Often, but since president defender of sodomy laws announced his
support for the anti-gay marriage amendment more then ever, I've
heard people, gay and straight, wonder how the hell anyone can
identify as gay and republican. Gay and conservative...maybe. But
the republican party is to homosexuals as the Ku Klux Klan is to
non-whites and jews. How does any self respecting gay declare
membership in a political party that hates their guts.

Well, thanks to
Boi From Troy
I think I now know the answer: They have a problem seeing things
that are right in front of their faces.

It was reading about
Wonkette's Gayest Seeming Bushie Contest
that I saw the link to Boi. He describes himself as "...a 6'1", 167
lb., 28 year-old, gay male, republican, sports fan living in West
Hollywood, California and sharing my thoughts on politics, sports and
gayness with the world." Okay. Swell. This world certainly
needs a 6'1", 167 lb., 28 year-old, gay male, republican, sports fan
living in West Hollywood, California, whose thoughts on gayness
include the observation that most "so-called" gay activists are more
interested in abortion, labor unions and raising your taxes than they
care about "with whom I can engage in buggery." Lest we all fear
that Andrew Sullivan might suddenly grow a conscience, re-read all
the political hackery he's done for a president who would as soon see
him locked up for sodomy as look at him, and crawl shame faced away
from public view. We need a spare...just in case.

But what really caught my attention was this:

In this post below, I linked to a New York Times photo of John
Kerry on the slopes in Ketchum. Now Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds,
Bill Hobbs and others are blogging about the mysterious daisy Kerry
was wearing that day...suggesting at first that it was either a ski
ticket or photoshopped. Their conclusion...it was neither a lift
ticket nor photoshopped.

But then I went back to look at the New York Times photo where
Kerry was wearing the same ski outfit that day...here are the two
photos side-by-side (NYT on the left, AP on right):

Notice anything missing from the New York Times photo? My local
Times is no stranger to doctoring images...could it be contagious
among major newspapers to selectively edit their pictures to
project the images they want?

No...he's serious. He thinks (or thought) that they're the same
image, only one's been slightly doctored to remove the daisy on
Kerry's jacket. Now...he actually went to the trouble to grab
and post both pictures, so you know the half-wit had to at least
glance at them once before he posted. And he really thought he saw
two versions of the same image.

He later updates his entry to note that a "careful reader" has
alerted him to the fact that the jacket is different in both
pictures. Gosh that was careful. Then he makes the discovery all by
himself that Kerry's "undershirt" is different too. Way careful.

Hey Sherlock...the snow board's different too. And the background.
And the curl of snow under the board. And the angle of his head. Oh
hell...never mind...

So if you've ever wondered how a gay republican can act like they
just don't see how much their party hates them...well...they may
really have trouble seeing what's right in front of their noses after
all.

Don't Ask Don't Tell, continues to squander the future of this
nation's best and brightest...

BOULDER - Touched by the story of a University of Colorado student
who was kicked out of the Air Force ROTC for admitting she is a
lesbian, a professor and an alumna are trying to help.

Mara Boyd had her military scholarship revoked after coming out to
her commander in September 2002 in violation of the "don't ask,
don't tell" policy. Told she would have to pay back the $30,990
for failing to complete her service, Boyd left school and started
working as a gardener.

"It's pretty daunting to take on that kind of debt," said Boyd, now
22.

Journalism professor Jan Whitt and Susan Schmidt, a member of the
Alumni Association, hope to make it less so. They've set up a fund
to raise money toward Boyd's debt, with the ultimate goal of seeing
her return to the university.

"I want Mara back in school," Whitt said. "She is bright,
articulate, courageous and honest. She will succeed at whatever
she does, and I want her to graduate and represent the university
well."

After hearing about the story, CU leaders, including Chancellor
Richard Byyny, requested that the Air Force excuse her debt. They
argued in a letter that she had been an exemplary cadet who didn't
realize she was a lesbian until after her sophomore year.

They said the presence of homosexuals in the ranks was too disturbing
to other soldiers. So the courage, energy and ability of
literally tens of thousands of American citizens like Mara Boyd
would be sacrificed, so that others could feel more comfortable in
their barracks.

Others like Max Rodriguez...

DENVER -- A former Air Force Academy cadet accused of rape will be
commissioned as an officer after he successfully appealed a
separate disciplinary case, the man's accuser said.

Military officials informed 2nd Lt. Lisa Ballas that Max Rodriguez
will become a commissioned officer, Ballas told The Associated
Press on Wednesday night.

Rodriguez was never charged with sexual assault but was expelled
for other reasons that were not disclosed. He appealed to Air Force
Secretary James Roche, who ruled in his favor, said Air Force
spokesman Col. Jay DeFrank.

"During the course of an extensive review, it was determined that
there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing and that Rodriguez
should be reinstated and commissioned," DeFrank said.

"I feel this is a personal attack against me," said Ballas, who has
agreed to have her name used. "The thing I have wanted the most
from all of this is for Max Rodriguez not to wear a uniform. Now
that he will I can't stay quiet."

...

Rodriguez has denied assaulting Ballas. His lawyers said she had
been drinking heavily with Rodriguez and others the night of the
alleged assault and had been involved in a game of strip poker
before the alleged attack on Oct. 13, 2001.

"My parents were told by prosecutors that there was no way he would
be charged with rape, but they would do their best to get him
removed because they knew of other improper behavior," said Ballas,
now a second lieutenant in flight training in Pensacola,
Fla.

The alleged improper behavior was never specified. DeFrank said he
had no information on what had been alleged against
Rodriguez.

Ballas' case was one of several that led to sweeping changes at the
academy, including the ouster of the top four commanders.

Remarks by Brig. Gen. Taco S. Gilbert, then commandant of the
academy, were interpreted as partially blaming her for the
events.

There is a nexus in the contempt of the homophobe and the misogynist,
and you never see it more clearly then in the U.S. military's
treatment of women and homosexuals. They both bring their troubles
on themselves for not knowing their place. They are both guilty
until proven innocent.

I hear so many people these days talk in tones of amazed wonderment
about how republicans and conservatives have been so quick to
abandon their core principles, such as states rights, with things
like the anti-gay marriage amendment or over things like Bush's steel
tariffs and big spending ways. But it was always easy for them to
posture when they weren't actually in a position to dictate policy.
Now they are, and lo and behold the truth comes out. They never had
core principles. What they had was rhetoric. Different things.

If liberals are people who believe in less personal freedom, big
spending and big government with no accountability, then republicans
are liberals.

Well...I thought I was going to take a hiatus...and I still might.
But I had to post about this: It looks like the Bush gang are going
to play the queer card on Richard Clarke. I have no idea at this
point whether the man is actually gay or not, but thems apparently
the rumors the Bush gang is now spreading, in their ongoing smear
campaign against him.

Last week an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about
the killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin said, "This isn't America; the
government did not invent intelligence material nor exaggerate the
description of the threat to justify their attack."

So even in Israel, George Bush's America has become a byword for
deception and abuse of power...

I reckon there aren't too many people left on this good earth who are
still deluding themselves about the inner squalor of the man
occupying the white house and his gang. Anyone with half a brain saw
it during the primary, and even a dead pig on a stick could have seen
it after Florida. The people still proclaiming his virtues in office
now are his fellow residents in the American gutter. They know what
he is, and they're fine with it, because they know what they are.

On Atrios' comment boards, they're talking about mutually assured
destruction, as in what happened to Pete Williams during the Don't
Ask, Don't Tell fight. Personally, I'm all for it, but it's worth
bearing in mind that mutually assured destruction is still
destruction and that's fine with the thugs in power now. The ashes
of our democracy is where they hope to do their victory dance.

This administration's reliance on smear tactics is unprecedented in
modern U.S. politics - even compared with Nixon's. Even more
disturbing is its readiness to abuse power - to use its control of
the government to intimidate potential critics.

Paul Krugman

Getting these goons out of the seats of power is going to be painful.
Fine. Bring it on.

Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area,
and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own
pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a
nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me
to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the
month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch,
stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference
hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by
the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall.
I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of
Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a
bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his
own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the
university that bore his friend's name, shaking the hand of each of
those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the
back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries...Freedom Toast... An
old friend of mine I'd had breakfast with that morning, told me a
joke he'd heard about a man who, while visiting France recently,
asked a random Frenchman, "Sir, can you speak German?" When the
Frenchman replied that he couldn't, the American said, "You're
welcome." I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have
asked the American, "Sir, do you have a king?"

My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the
elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one
finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside.
It's a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back
of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the
look of them, to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there
are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes,
the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the
coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in
particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me
I'd almost forgotten about, a "Yes I'm a longhair, yes I know you
hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don't
give a flying fuck" attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the
elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly
about writing a book, "Everything I know about living under Bush II,
I learned from Nixon". The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of
my companions say, "I hope they don't cancel our flight out Thursday."
The other chuckles and says, "The war will be over by then."

The New York Times has an article up today about
real estate law as it applies to same sex couples.
Anyone who has heard the argument that same sex couples don't need
marriage, because they can make private contracts to secure their
rights if they want (and who hasn't heard that argument), might want
to read this.

Another form of title to real estate, Ms. Bluth said, is known as a
tenancy by the entirety. "This form of ownership is only available
to persons who are legally married when they acquire the property,"
she said, adding that while tenancy by the entirety historically
applied only to real property - like houses and condominiums - on
Jan. 1, 1996, the law in New York was changed to allow co-op
apartments to be owned as a tenancy by the entirety.

With this form of ownership, Ms. Bluth said, the spouses do not
hold partial ownership interests in the property. "Instead, each
spouse owns 100 percent of the property and the right to possess
the entire premises, subject to the parallel right of the other
spouse," she said. And when one spouse dies, the surviving spouse
automatically becomes the sole owner of the property, not because
of any right of survivorship, but because he or she has always had
a 100 percent ownership interest.

"In essence, upon the death of the first tenant by the entirety,
his or her interest in the property merely disappears," Ms. Bluth
said, adding that the law makes certain assumptions about how title
to property will be held in the absence of a specific election by
the parties to hold title in another way.

"The law assumes that a married couple acquiring real property or a
co-op apartment take title as tenants by the entirety," she said.
"And when unmarried people acquire real property or a co-op
apartment, the law assumes that they take title as tenants in
common."

I'm sure this varies state by state...but not by much in any
fundamental way. Marriage confers rights automatically, that
couples who cannot legally marry cannot attain in any other way,
even if they tried. A same sex couple cannot make a contract with
each other for "tenancy by the entirety", because that form of
ownership is reserved for legally married couples only.

One thing that bears keeping in mind is that people who are familiar
with how the law works, and that would include lawyers, real estate
agents, any number of people who deal with matters of law on a day to
day basis, would know perfectly well the degree to which unmarried
couples cannot avail themselves of the rights married couples can.
When the lobbyists for various anti-gay political organizations yap
for the TV that gay couples don't need marriage, because they can
always write a contract, they almost certainly know from first hand
experience that what they're saying isn't true.

It wasn't the Successories graphic of Christ on the cross, there
below the menu of the website of official licensed products for Mel
Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ. No. It wasn't the empty
cross coffee mugs. No. It wasn't the Passion Nail (as in nailed to a
cross) necklaces, available in 1 7/8 and 2 5/8 sizes for men and
women. No. T'was the
Passion Nail keyrings
that
marked the official end of satire.

There. You've lived to see it. Remember this moment well. Future
generations will ask you what it was like.

GULFPORT - The City Council passed a resolution Tuesday supporting
President Bush's proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban
same-sex marriages.

Councilman Billy Hewes introduced the resolution, saying it would
help to protect the country's moral character from the forces of
evil.

"To me, folks, things like (same-sex marriage) is the devil at
work," Hewes said. "I think it is one of the most irresponsible
things that people in government could allow to happen."

The resolution states the acceptance of same-sex marriage would
"have a devastating effect on moral traditions and on the laws and
legal system of the country."

Mayor Ken Combs endorsed the resolution.

"About 54 years ago when I got married to my wife, it was perfectly
legal for us to get married and illegal for people of same sex to
marry one another and that's the way I stand today," Combs said.
"I don't move a bit from that stance."

We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to
distinguish between "anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism";
between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but
insufficient" cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of
the children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such.
These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth
of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made
holy, it became lethal.

RACINE - Marilyn Riedel, 61, a disabled Army veteran, has trouble
moving, drinking and eating. It's difficult for her to talk because
her worsening Parkinson's disease makes her tongue quiver.

But she's so lucky. She's lucky because a woman named Connie
Guardino, 58, loves her with her whole heart. Whatever the future may
offer, this couple will face it together, and they'd like to do it in
a cute little two-bedroom home on Illinois Street.

If they were married, they could have it. But because they are a
same-sex couple, they've been rejected for a loan by the Wisconsin
Department of Veterans Affairs.

Politicians and citizens may debate what rights are appropriate for
same-sex couples, but it's up to Riedel and Guardino to live with the
results.

...

In the 1960s, this Army captain had 130 soldiers under her as she
struggled to hide her sexual orientation. Her unit at Fort Ritchie in
Maryland helped to operate a communications center for the president
near the Camp David presidential retreat. Meanwhile, she feared she'd
be transferred to some undesirable spot in Europe if her sexual
orientation was discovered.

Later, as a pastor at Mount Pleasant Lutheran Church, 1700 S. Green
Bay Road, she struggled to reconcile her faith with her sexual
orientation. Soon after leaving the church in the mid-1980s, she
noticed her left hand quivering. At first she thought it was some
sort of inherited trait.

She was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

100 percent disabled Now, retired Capt. Marilyn Riedel has served her
country, and she is labeled 100 percent disabled by the government,
but she may not apply for a veterans loan with her same-sex
partner.

The Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs offers sweetheart deals
on loans to veterans. But without much of an income, Riedel can't
qualify for a loan. With Guardino as a co-applicant, she'd be able to
qualify, but a co-applicant must be a spouse under Wisconsin
law.

"A spouse is an individual who enters a valid marriage contract.
Unless the law is changed, there is no way that we can change that,"
Wisconsin DVA spokesman Andrew Schuster said in an interview. "We go
directly by the statutes. We don't have any authority to vary
that."

Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs Division Administrator
William Kloster sent Riedel an e-mail on March 12 that explains her
same-sex partner cannot be a co-applicant. He adds: "I know this may
not help you but we are bound by the law and the rules that apply to
the bonds we buy to make loans."

Of course, if the federal anti same-sex marriage amendment passes,
this will become the law of the land in every state, regardless of
how much its people may be offended at the knuckle dragging
bigotries of other states. Meanwhile, states that are passing anti
same sex marriage amendments, are nowadays taking care to spell out
the fact that any civil recognition of same sex couples will be
against the law, no matter how small. In states that have already
passed them, republicans are busy closing what they see as the
domestic partners loop hole. If the republicans have their way,
discrimination against homosexual Americans will become as deeply
engrained in American law, as racial apartheid was once in South
Africa. Homosexuals will have to live under a set of laws crafted
specifically to exclude us from as many aspects of civil life as the
republicans can think of. We will become non-citizens, in our own
country.

For years I've heard gay republicans and gay conservatives argue that
there are more important matters for them to consider when voting,
then their sexuality. Economic matters. Matters of national, and
personal defense. But if you allow the pink triangle to be sewn into
the constitution, none of these will matter. You'll have no
economic rights. Your country will have no interest in defending you,
and you'll have no right to defend yourself. When that day comes, all
that will matter is survival, and the odds won't be in your favor.

Via
365Gay.Com...
Bush Office Of Special Counsel appointee Scott Bloch, says that while
gay and lesbian federal employees cannot be fired for attending a gay
pride event, they can on the other hand, be fired simply for being
homosexual...

"People confuse conduct and sexual orientation as the same thing,
and I don't think they are," Bloch said in an interview with
Federal Times, a publication for government employees.

Bloch said gays, lesbians and bisexuals cannot be covered as a
protected class because they are not protected under the nation's
civil rights laws.

"When you're interpreting a statute, you have to be very careful to
interpret strictly according to how it's written and not get into
loose interpretations," Bloch said. "Someone may have jumped to the
conclusion that conduct equals sexual orientation, but they are
essentially very different. One is a class . . . and one is
behavior."

This is almost a complete reverse of the tack I hear most homophobes
take when it comes to workplace discrimination. The usual rhetoric
you hear is more along the lines that nobody is ever fired just for
being gay, they're fired for some sort of homosexual conduct. If
you don't act on your unnatural urges, how is anyone going to know
that you're a homosexual...? Bloch, since he is
apparently unable to justify letting federal gay employees be fired
for conduct, such as going to a pride day event, without a doubt at
the behest of his master in the white house, deftly turns it on its
head. Okay...we can't fire you for acting gay, but we can still fire
you for being gay. And speaking of complete reversals, this
renounces federal policy on discrimination due to sexual orientation
going back to 1973.

You have to figure they've nothing to lose now, when it comes to
prejudice toward gay and lesbian Americans. They've waved the bloody
flag over same sex marriage, the few naive (okay...blind as bats) gay
supporters they managed to hold onto up until then are livid, nobody
can seriously claim anymore that Bush isn't actively hostile toward
homosexual Americans, so...what the hell...let's go all out for the
gay bashing vote. Might as well.

Once upon a time they were at the cutting edge of a new technology,
that brought power to everyday people in a way the world hadn't seen
since Gutenberg. Now they're falling over each other to sell that
promise out for a seat at the feast of thugs and tyrants.

Okay...now they're yapping that not only don't we love,
homosexuals don't have sex either. In L.A. Times letters to the
editor page the other day was this fragrant little gem:

Kmiec's column explained the legal issues of gay marriage quite
well. Sex is a union of male with female. As such, gays do not
have sex. They can only engage in sex play. If the polarity is
missing, the act is not sex; and a union between like genetic
material is impossible.

I might want, with all my heart, to play center for the Lakers. But
I'm too old, too short, female and a terrible athlete. It would be
ridiculous for me to suggest I am entitled to play with the Lakers
because I have the same rights as any human.

Gays are entitled to form unions that meet their needs and give
them full protection under the law. But they need to do so without
trying to redefine sex and marriage.

Rosemary Patterson, Los Angeles

Well...okay...if Rosemary to-old-to-play-football is old enough,
there won't be any "union between like genetic material" in her bed
either, which means she doesn't have sex, nor do a lot of
heterosexual couples.

I know...I know...people who dispense this crap are morons. So
what's being proven here isn't that a lot of people only think
they're having sex, but that some people only think they can
think.

God loves you and I love you and you can count on both of us as a
powerful message that people who wonder about the future can
hear.George W. Bush - in a speech before the "Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives Conference" in Los Angles On March 3, 2004
As Quoted in Slate.Com

Every weekend now since I started working back in September to finish
my degree, I've felt the pressure of two colliding deadlines. My
classes almost always have had Sunday at midnight as the deadline for
submitting work for grading. But for two years now, that's also been
my self imposed deadline for getting a new cartoon up. This weekend,
I finally had to accept the fact that I can't keep doing both,
without ending the weekend too stressed for work the following
Monday. That work pays my bills, and it's the one pure joy of my
life currently, so I need to adjust things around here.

Starting this week, new cartoons will appear on Wednesday, instead of
Monday. I think that'll work out better, because evenings during the
first few days of the week are generally my least stressful, and
that'll allow me to finish up a cartoon gracefully, without rushing
anything onto my scanner.

I know, because a few of you have told me, how much having your
Monday "fix" of one of my cartoons is to you. And I always wanted it
to be a start the week kinda thing for my readers. But the
programming assignments I'm getting now are intense, and I just can't
do both over the weekend anymore. So think of them now, as more a
middle of the week breather. Something to remind you in the middle
of yet another week of republican right wing homophobic babbling why
you're still fighting the good fight.

Stay tuned...I may have something else for you sometime in April. (I
hope...)

Every time I hear a black conservative bellyaching that gays have
never had to face prejudice and discrimination and hate the way
blacks have, I am reminded of a line I heard somewhere, that yes, our
struggle is a different one: for one thing black kids don't have to
tell their parents they're black. The fight for justice and equal
rights, brands our consciousness in a different way. If it seems
sometimes as if our struggle is more personal and emotional and heart
embittering, there's a reason. The knife strikes us first from those
we are the most vulnerable to, and at a time when we are already busy
struggling our way though adolescence. Family. Mothers and Fathers.
Childhood friends and peers. Dealing with the hatred of strangers is
trivial by comparison. Strangers can wound your body, they can take
your life, they can make you afraid, but only family can eat your
heart and spit it back out.

I had it good. My own parents simply refused to talk about the
matter, and right to the end of their lives maintained a don't ask,
don't tell policy regarding it. They never nagged me to get a
girlfriend, never forced me into church or therapy, always, in every
other way possible, showed me that they loved me. But the subject of
my sexuality was utterly off limits. Even when I brought boyfriends
into our apartment, they would doggedly refuse to see the obvious.
Smiles all around, but I never got the discussion of the dating and
mating game others did while growing up. Yet, I consider myself
blessed. One boyfriend told me, in hushed words as we lay together
one night, how after he came out to his own parents, how after they
both reassured him of their undying love, the next morning his father
printed up several hundred brochures listing every biblical damnation
of homosexuality he could find, and added a few of his own for good
measure, and then placed one in the front door of every house in
their neighborhood.

You hear people complaining about the apolitical mindset of many
gays. I think the reason isn't self centeredness, so much as that
the family battle looms so large by comparison, and wounds so
deeply, that there is almost no room left for political activism.
Many deal with the family matter by moving far away, cocooning,
dropping out as some in my generation used to advise. The fear is
that opening the lid on politics, getting into the political battle,
will reopen deep, and always tender wounds.

But for Gays and Lesbians, there is almost nothing about the act of
making a life for ourselves, that isn't political, that doesn't
require a degree of bravery, a willingness to endure once more, the
old wound:

David Knight, son of the state senator who was the author of the
California ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage, defied his
father's law and wed his partner of 10 years Tuesday in a quiet
ceremony attended by just two friends in San Francisco City
Hall.

Atop the grand staircase of City Hall's rotunda, Knight and Joe
Lazzaro of Baltimore exchanged rings and were pronounced spouses
for life one month after Sen. William "Pete" Knight, R-Palmdale,
proclaimed San Francisco's same- sex marriages "nothing more than a
sideshow."

The younger Knight and Lazzaro joined the growing ranks of couples
-- more than 3,700 -- who have wed in San Francisco since Mayor
Gavin Newsom on Feb. 12 ordered the city to begin issuing marriage
licenses to gay and lesbian couples.

Knight and Lazzaro said the ceremony Tuesday reaffirmed the
commitment they had made two years ago in a civil union ceremony in
Vermont. "Vermont was the big deal," Knight said. "That was our
real commitment. This is to be part of what's happening across the
country."

Civil unions, such as those adopted by the state of Vermont in
2000, are legal partnerships recognized by the state and conferring
most of the legal benefits of marriage including the right to share
title on a house, file joint state tax returns, sue for wrongful
death and make decisions on behalf of their partner in the event of
a medical emergency.

The difference between the Vermont civil union and the San
Francisco marriage, Knight said, is that "although Vermont
recognizes the 400 or so rights granted by that state, if we lived
in Vermont, we'd have those, but we'd still lack the thousand or so
rights a married couple, a heterosexual couple, receives from the
federal government."

Knight's father did not attend either ceremony in Vermont or San
Francisco. He did not return calls seeking comment Tuesday.

...

...When Bird, the volunteer who performed Tuesday's ceremony,
learned afterward who he had just wed, he gasped.

"You are giving me goosebumps," he said. "I just married Pete
Knight's son."

There is our struggle in a nutshell. Wish them luck. Wish them all
the best. Wish for the day to come soon, very soon, when Gay and
Lesbian children won't have to walk through life, with a knife in
their heart.

POLITICIANS who spark a culture war for the sake of their own power
are playing with fire, and journalists who exploit a culture war
for the sake of its unleashed furies are throwing gasoline on the
flames. At the beginning of the presidential election contest, that
is history's warning to America.

...

...When quasi-hysterical fearmongering replaces reasonable debate,
dark forces can be set in motion that outrun anyone's intentions,
and that is especially true when the question involves a segment of
society that has long been subject to irrational bigotry. To define
the wish of homosexuals for equal access to marriage rites and
rights as a mortal threat to the social order, as Bush does, is to
put gay people themselves in an unprecedented position of jeopardy.
Bush and a conservative punditry, out of crude self-interest, are
working hard to reverse the evolution of attitudes that has blurred
the boundary between blue America and red. Bush wants that boundary
bright. In an election year, it may work. But it is
dangerous.

The phrase "culture war" comes from "Kulturkampf." That word was
coined in the 1870s when Germany's George W. Bush, Otto von
Bismarck, launched a "values" campaign as a way of shoring up his
political power. Distracting from issues of war and economic
stress, the "Kulturkampf" ran from 1871 to about 1887. Bismarck's
strategy was to unite his base by inciting hatred of those who were
not part of it.

His first target was the sizable Catholic minority in the new,
mostly Protestant German state, but soon enough, especially after
an economic depression in 1873, Jews were defined as the main
threat to social order. This was a surprising turn because Jewish
emancipation had been a feature of German culture as recently as
the 1860s. By 1879, the anti-Jewish campaign was in full swing: It
was in that year that the word "anti-Semitism" was coined, defining
not a prejudice but a public virtue. The Kulturkampf was explicitly
understood as a struggle against decadence, of which the liberal
emancipated Jew became a symbol. What that culture war's
self-anointed defenders of a moral order could not anticipate was
what would happen when the new "virtue" of anti-Semitism was
reinforced by the then burgeoning pseudo-science of the eugenics
movement. Bismarck's defense of expressly German values was a
precondition of Hitler's anti-Jewish genocide.

One need not predict equivalence between the eventual outcome of
Bismarck's culture war and the threat of what Bush's could lead to.
For our purposes, the thing to emphasize is that a leader's
exploitation of subterranean fears and prejudices for the sake of
political advantage is a dangerous ploy, even if done in the name
of virtue. No, make that especially if done in the name of virtue.

Meanwhile, back at the
Rhino Times,
Orson Scott Card is answering
some of the angry mail his column on same sex marriage provoked:

To Mr. Lee, I can only say that you are the reason some of us are
terrified about what is about to happen to the First Amendment. When
a carefully reasoned essay is published in opposition to the current
political innovation of gay "marriage," which is being forced on an
unwilling public by judicial fiat, instead of answering a single
idea in the essay, you immediately label it "hate literature."

Those of you who have read The Hypocrites Of Homosexuality, may
recall that Card advocates the use of sodomy laws, not so much as an
excuse to witch hunt homosexuals, but as an effective means of
punishing those who defy social mores, and flaunt their homosexuality
openly. And calling his attacks on homosexuals hate literature is a
terrifying threat to his first amendment rights. Oh...I get it
now...the hypocrites he was referring to, were homophobes like
him.

No use to suggest that he talk to the few remaining survivors of the
German Kulturkampf, who were forced to wear the pink triangle, about
what it means to be terrified. He thinks terrorizing homosexuals is
a social necessity.

After a while I stopped being shocked to discover that someone I
had known well, or whose talent I admired, was either moving into
or already a part of the not-so-clandestine network of gay
relationships. I learned that being homosexual does not destroy a
person's talent or deny those aspects of their character that I had
already come to love and admire. I did learn that for most of them
their highest allegiance was to their membership in the community
that gave them access to sex.-Orson Scott Card

The tragedy of people who loved Ender's Game, is in
discovering that the author of their beloved novel is a lot less
decent and humane then the book he produced, that he is in fact a
moral runt with the conscience of a lynch mob leader. I can relate
in a small way, having once loved some of the music of Ricard Wagner,
only to discover that it's inextricably entwined with his passionate
antisemitism. You allow the artist's work to enter a very private,
and intimate part of your heart, and then you learn that all that
time it was a smarmy sleezebag that you were letting press your
buttons. Not as bad as discovering that the prince charming you've
been sleeping with was burning crosses and robbing convenience stores
nights he wasn't with you...but close.

For fans of Orson Scott Card, the shock usually comes while reading
The Hypocrites of Homosexuality for the first time, although
for Donna Minkowitz,
it came while interviewing him.
Back in the early 90s, his tune was that The Hypocrites of
Homosexuality was only his statement of belief as a Mormon, and
wasn't intended as an attack on gays who weren't part of his faith.
That was then, and this is now, and now, provoked by the recent
outpouring of support for same sex marriage, Orson Scott Card has
written another
rant about homosexuality, and it's something we can all welcome as
the end of pretense with him. It's worth reading, not just as a
textbook example of the unflinching dishonesty of homophobes, but to
see for yourself what an addiction to hate can do to someone, who
might once have become a decent man.

Card is there, for all to see, one of a rapidly shrinking wing of
American hatemongering; the otherwise respected public figure, who is
perfectly willing to let the world see how utterly incapable they are
of seeing the humanity of homosexual people. Once upon a time it
would have been unremarkable. But now that we gays and lesbians are
living our lives openly, insisting to anyone who will listen that
homosexuals are sub human deviates, malformed monstrosities incapable
of experiencing the richness of life at best, and hell bent on
destroying that richness for others, is no longer a sure fire line of
persuasion. In fact it is political death and they know it. The
problem the homophobic right faces today, is how to affect anti-gay
public policies without appearing to be motivated by nothing more
noble then an irreducible hatred of homosexuals. So just the other
day on Capital Hill, you heard a minister arguing that even though
same sex couples can be both decent and loving, marriage isn't about
love. That's how desperate they are. Card on the other hand, makes
the purer case: homosexuals don't love, they just have sex.
Homosexuals are incapable of experiencing the joy and wonder of
romantic love. Homosexuals are separated from the cycle of life.
Homosexuals are damaged, deformed consciousness, twisted, alien to
the fundamental nature of human existence. You could just picture
him patiently, earnestly, saying all this to a group of young
science-fiction fans, most of whom these days have friends who are
gay, if not openly gay themselves, utterly clueless as to what he's
telling them, not about homosexuals, but about himself.

Now, you could call that brave in its own way, but it's more like the
stupidity that happens when you let a festering hate rot your brain
for a few decades. Hate like that wages war on every other part of
your consciousness, because it will not endure questioning, will not
accept anything other then being the central focus of your life. It
must rule over all. Your intellect. Your conscience. Your sense of
honor and justice, and any capacity you might have had for sympathy
and human decency. All of it has to step aside. And right away in
Card's latest rant, you can see that his base moral instincts are
completely gone:

In the first place, no law in any state in the United States, now
or ever, has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never
asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a
woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her
husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under
the law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely
that, without any legal prejudice at all.

Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married men and borne children.
And while a fair number of such marriages in recent years have
ended in divorce, there are many that have not.

So it is a flat lie to say that homosexuals are deprived of any
civil right pertaining to marriage.

To just write this off as sophistry misses it. Yes, it's sophistry.
It's also dishonest in a particularly totalitarian doublespeak way,
which makes it striking coming from a man who claims to be defending
democracy over the rule of activist judges. In the former Soviet
Union, the laws made it difficult to impossible for Christians to
worship freely. But those laws, the Soviets insisted, were not
discriminatory, since everyone, atheists included, had to obey them.
And of course, in some parts of the United States, particularly the
south, race segregation was justified as being applied equally to all
races. This is the kind of argument you make, when you don't want to
defend the morality of an act, so much as confuse and naturalize the
moral judgments of others. It is the technique of a Stalinist, not a
defender of morality. An honest person would acknowledge and
justify the discrimination, but Card's first act in making his case,
is to reach for mendacity, and then wave it in his reader's faces.
Right away he is telling us, that he has no use for the moral
argument, and it's a safe bet that he tells us this because he knows
the moral argument is not his friend.

When you see yourself lying to your audience like this, it ought to
ring your alarm bells, it ought to wake you up. A truly moral man
would see this for what it is; a warning to oneself. But when hate
is the monkey on your back, the warnings just get ignored. You throw
everything away, your conscience, your honor, your good name, your
sense of right and wrong, all of it becomes so much excess baggage,
because in the end all that matters, is the hate.

And it's fitting, that immediately after declaring his intention to
deceive his readers, he shows them, in all its sickening glory, why
he must:

However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel
themselves to be, what they are doing is not marriage. Nor does
society benefit in any way from treating it as if it were.

However emotionally bonded a pair of homosexual lovers may feel
themselves to be... Not, "however much in love a homosexual
couple may be", but "however emotionally bonded a pair of
homosexual lovers may feel themselves to be." Homosexual love is
not real love at all, but a fake, a fraud, a pale and pathetic
imitation. Later, he makes it even more clear:

They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves
nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing
dress-up in their parents' clothes.

How does he know this? How can he, or anyone else say with
certainty, that anyone else's love for their mate is not real, is not
deep and profound? During Karen Thompson's decade long legal fight
to be reunited with her beloved Sharon Kowalski, kept isolated by her
parents in a nursing home after a motorcycle accident that left her
severely incapacitated, Kowalski's father once asked plaintively,
"What does this woman want with my daughter? She's in diapers." For
Card, for any homophobe, to acknowledge that homosexuals couples
love each another, is necessarily to acknowledge the humanity in
homosexuals, and this is the critical line that the homophobe is
incapable of crossing. They complain that people call them bigots as
a tool to shut down discussion, but if the word has any meaning at
all, then it is describing them exactly, and here in passages like
that is where you see it. Hello...my name is Orson Scott
Card....I cannot see the people for the homosexuals...and here is a
little essay to prove it to you... People see this, and shrink
away, and the homophobes complain about political correctness, when
what's happening is they're colliding head-on with other people's
conscience, and having little to none of their own, they don't
understand it.

I've no intention here to do a detailed analysis of Card's latest.
I've got school work to do this weekend. Most of the rest of the
article, which is larger then his Hypocrites of Homosexuality
article of some years back, just waves the usual homosexual bogeyman.
Homosexuals don't want equal rights, they want to destroy
heterosexual families. Homosexuals aren't born, they're made,
usually by being abused as children. If we allow same sex marriage,
America will be destroyed. No...I'm not exaggerating what Card is
saying. What's striking isn't the content, so much as its
pornographic indifference to shame. But I can't end this post,
without noting this:

If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare
that marriage no longer exists - which is what the Massachusetts
decision actually does - then our allegiance to America will become
zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does
protect marriage.

Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender's Game is knocking on
the door to Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVey land. Don't be surprised
if he walks in. The America of the golden door is as foreign, and as
vile a place to his kind, as it was to the islamic radicals who
murdered several thousand Americans on September 11, 2001.

A common refrain we're hearing now, is that Bush was pushed into
supporting a constitutional amendment, banning same sex marriage.
He didn't choose this fight, we're being told, by the same crowd in
fact, that said Bush didn't want to go to war with Saddam. Yeah...he
was pushed into that war too. But now it is activist judges and
militant homosexuals who are pushing Bush to take this step. He
didn't choose this fight, they keep saying.

Let's review a few little snippets of recent gay history...

When Sharon Kowalski was injured in an automobile accident in
November 1983, her partner, Karen Thompson had to fight a nightmarish
legal battle with Kowalski's parents lasting ten years. During that
time, Kowalski's parents placed her in a nursing home where they
could insure that Thompson would be kept away. The nursing home was
unequipped to give Kowalski the physical therapy she needed, and
which might have made a difference in the extent of her recovery had
it been given to her early on. When Kowalski was given a typewriter
to communicate, she instantly began typing out calls for Karen. The
typewriter was taken from her.

When Juan Navarrete came home in 1989 and found his partner LeRoy
Tranton lying bloody on the concrete driveway to their house, it
marked the beginning of a bitter fight with Tranton's brother who
prevented Navarrete from seeing his beloved in the hospital. Despite
Tranton's persistent calling for his lover Juan, he was kept away.
When Tranton later died, Navarrete was unable even to visit the
grave.

In 1993, a Virginia judge ruled that Sharon Bottoms was an unfit
mother because she was a lesbian, and awarded custody of her
20-month-old son, to her mother, who had sought custody of the boy
when she learned her daughter was a lesbian, and in love with another
woman.

In 2000, a court in Tacoma Washington ruled that Frank Vasques could
be denied his lover of 28 years' estate because the two where in a
homosexual relationship. They had shared a house, business and
financial assets for 28 years.

After NBC news cameraman Rob Pierce died in a helicopter crash, his
family visited his partner Frank Gagliano, in the Miami condominium
the two had shared. After mourning together, they told Gagliano he
should take a walk on the beach. Then Pierce's family changed the
locks on the condo, and when Gagliano returned, told him he was no
longer welcome there. Gagliano had to go to court just to get his
belongings.

And in Massachusetts, after Ken Kirkey's partner Mark died of cancer,
Mark's family removed his ashes from the home the two shared. Kirkey
discovered he had no legal right to Mark's ashes, though they were
among the first to take advantage of Vermont's new Civil Unions law.

In 2001 Sharon Smith was told she had no legal standing to file a
wrongful death suit against Robert Noel and Marjorie Knoller,
after two of their dogs mauled her partner Diane Whipple to death in
the hallway of her apartment.

In 2002 Officials at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center barred William
Robert Flanigan Jr. from his dying partner's bedside, saying he was
not "family", and that 'partners' did not qualify. Though Flanigan
had legal power of attorney for his partner, Robert Lee Daniel,
officials at the Shock Trauma Center insisted he would not be allowed
his partner's bedside. Only when Daniel's mother arrived from New
Mexico, was Flanigan allowed into Daniel's room. By that time, Daniel
had lost consciousness. He would die two days later. Because Flanigan
was not present during Daniel's final four hours of consciousness,
Flanigan was unable to tell Shock Trauma that Daniel did not want
breathing tubes or a respirator. When Daniel tried to rip the tubes
out of his throat, staff members put his arms in restraints

People who say that George Bush wasn't spoiling for this fight, but
had it forced upon him, are not merely blaming the victims of
prejudice for fighting back, they are erasing a long and
heartbreaking history of discrimination, as if it never happened. It
is gay and lesbian Americans who were never spoiling for this fight,
who have had it forced upon us time and time again.

In the past, we simply fought for our rights as couples piecemeal.
Please give us hospital visitation rights. Please give us the right
to share property. Please don't take everything away from one, when
the other dies. Please. And every time we have asked for these
meager portions of the vast estate that heterosexual couples
regard as their natural right, we have been accused of trying to
impose homosexual marriage on the rest of the country. Hospital
visitation? No, that would amount to homosexual marriage.
Inheritance rights, shared property rights? No, that would amount to
homosexual marriage. The right to mourn at our partners' graveside?
No, that would amount to homosexual marriage. No matter how small
the shred of human dignity we have asked for, always the answer has
been the same: you can't have it, because that would amount to
legitimizing homosexual marriage.

Fine. So now we are fighting for the right to marry. And I'm
laughing in the face of every drooling moron who's saying that we
forced this fight on the rest of America. For years, for decades,
you've told us that the only way to secure any right for our
households, was to fight for the whole, for the right to marry. Now
we are. This is the fight you told us we had to wage. You wouldn't
accept anything else. Fine. Then accept this as tribute: You were
right all along. We were too timid. We were beggars, when we should
have been fighters. We were chumps, we were rubes, timidly
entreating swindlers and thieves to please not steal quite so much of
the wonder and joy from our lives. You were right to force us to
this place, to demand that we either fight for the legitimacy and
righteousness of our love, or shut the hell up. Now fight for your
hate or shut the hell up. Don't tell us the second class
citizenship you've been saying for decades was too much, is now
suddenly good enough...for you. Don't lecture us about civility and
respect for one another out of one side of your mouth, while calling
us and our households a threat to civilization out of the other.
Don't tell us we started this fight. You demanded this fight. Fine.
Now you have it. Here we are.

Of course, the powers that be at Baylor couldn't just leave it at
that...

Baylor Chief Decries Gay Marriage Defense
The Associated Press

WACO, Texas -- The president of Baylor University, the world's
largest Baptist school, said Tuesday he is "justifiably outraged"
over an editorial in the student newspaper that defended same-sex
marriages.

The editorial last week in the Baylor Lariat supported San
Francisco's lawsuit against the state of California seeking to
continue performing gay marriages.

"Taking into account equal protection under the law, gay couples
should be granted the same equal rights to legal marriage as
heterosexual couples," the editorial said. It also likened
discrimination against gays to racial or religious intolerance.

President Robert B. Sloan Jr. denounced the editorial in a strongly
worded statement that appeared in the newspaper Tuesday.

"We have already heard from a number of students, alumni and
parents who are, as am I, justifiably outraged over this
editorial," Sloan wrote.

"Espousing in a Baylor publication a view that is so out of touch
with traditional Christian teachings is not only unwelcome, it
comes dangerously close to violating university policy, as
published in the student handbook, prohibiting the advocacy of any
understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical
teaching," Sloan wrote.

The paper also published a statement Tuesday by the student
publications board, a group of faculty and administrators
overseeing the newspaper, calling Friday's editorial a violation of
student publications policy. The policy says student publications
should not "attack the basic tenets of Christian theology or of
Christian morality."

When I read the Baylor Lariat editorial in support of same-sex
marriage I was thrilled to see that the tradition of Roger Williams
had not completely died out in the faith. Were there more Baptists
like the students who wrote and published that editorial, I might
still be one today.

But thanks to theocrats like you, Baptist Popes as I once heard your
kind described, the faith looks more like that of the Taliban now,
then the faith of Roger Williams, who doggedly defended the rights of
Catholics, Jews and even Pagans in the new world, which is why I keep
my distance from it. I will admit to a measure of justifiable
outrage though, whenever I see theocratic louts like you making a
mockery of it, making the word "Baptist" something one would utter in
the same breath as "Theocrat" or "Stalinist" or "Mullah". Once upon
a time, Baptists stood for freedom of conscience. Once upon a time,
Baptists stood with Jefferson, and fought against religious litmus
tests for public office holders. Once upon a time, a Baptist named
Roger Williams said that God "...requireth not an uniformity of
religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which
enforced uniformity, sooner or later, is the greatest occasion of
civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in
his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of
souls." He wouldn't last a minute in your school, would he? But
then, neither would Jesus.

Homosexuals are to you, as witches were to your brethren in Salem,
and government to you, is nothing more then a forum for trying
witches. If the students did in fact violate your policy, that
student publications should not attack the basic tenets of Christian
theology or morality, as your publications board recently stated,
then the next time I hear someone complain about Christians being
ridiculed as nothing more then a bunch of ignorant witch burners,
I'll simply point them to Baylor University, and tell them that your
official position is that any student who thinks Christians aren't a
bunch of ignorant witch burners, is attacking the basic tenets of
Christian theology and morality.

All the hungry souls. All the hungry souls of this world. And all
you could do for them was take the fish, and the loaves, and the
wine, and turn them back into nothing.

Via Atrios, the student newspaper at Baylor university has come out
in support, not of domestic partnerships, not of civil unions, but of
same sex marriage:

The editorial board supports San Francisco's lawsuit against the
state. Taking into account equal protection under the law, gay
couples should be granted the same equal rights to legal marriage
as heterosexual couples. Without such recognition, gay couples,
even those who have co-habitated long enough to qualify as common
law spouses under many state laws, often aren't granted the same
protection when it comes to shared finances, health insurance and
other employee benefits, and property or power of attorney
rights.

Like many heterosexual couples, many gay couples share deep bonds
of love, some so strong they've persevered years of discrimination
for their choice to co-habitate with and date one another. Just as
it isn't fair to discriminate against someone for their skin color,
heritage or religious beliefs, it isn't fair to discriminate
against someone for their sexual orientation. Shouldn't gay couples
be allowed to enjoy the benefits and happiness of marriage, too?

There was a time, way back when, that Baptists were adamantly opposed
to any church/state entanglements. The faith is, at its
roots, highly anti-authoritarian, and profoundly individualistic.
The first Baptists, if they would be shocked at anything, would be
shocked that such a statement of principal would even be necessary.
The knuckle-draggers who have co-opted the faith today of course, are
going to be apoplectic that these kids have said what they said in a
Baptist university newspaper.

Thank you folks, from the bottom of my heart, for this little echo
of a past time, when Baptists regularly stood up to theocrats, in the
name of conscience.

God requireth not an uniformity of religion to be enacted and
enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity, sooner
or later, is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of
conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and
of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.

One useful thing about the current blow up over same sex marriage is
that many heterosexuals are now getting a chance to see how slimy the
other side is when it comes to presenting its case.
Joshua Marshall does a pretty good take down of professional hate
monger Gary Bauer's latest attempt to pervert science to the service
of hate...in this case, a paper published in the International
Journal of Epidemiology on gay and bisexual life expectancy
in Vancouver in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Focusing on the average lifespans of urban gay and bisexual men
during the height of the AIDS crisis is like focusing on the average
number of sex partners urban gay members of sex clubs and
bathhouses in the late 1970s have (another tactic of Bauer
and his kind), which
the authors of the Vancouver study point out:

Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in
this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to
that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871. In contrast, if
we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of gay
and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths from HIV
infection have declined dramatically in this population since 1996.
As we have previously reported there has been a threefold decrease
in mortality in Vancouver as well as in other parts of British
Columbia.

Marshall goes on to ridicule Bauer's logic:

Given the fact (controversial, but generally considered to be true)
that lesbians have a lower incidence of sexually trasmitted
diseases than either gay men or heterosexuals, by this logic, Bauer
should be pushing to ban straight marriages too and only allow
lesbian marriages. Perhaps he already is. He certainly wouldn't be
the first straight-laced middle-aged man to have a thing for
lesbians.

However that may be, this little reductio ad absurdum leads to the
big absurdum at the center of Bauer's silly argument: namely, that
if you're really serious about reducing the incidence of sexually
transmitted diseases among gay men -- rather than just bashing them
-- presumeably you'd want to encourage monogamy, and thus marriage,
rather than fight against it.

In fact, when you try to wrestle Bauer's foolishness and sexual
authoritarianism down to some measure of reality, you realize that
what he should really be calling for is something like mandatory
gay marriage, ambivalence about straight marriage and more or less
letting the lesbians just run wild.

That's perfectly true. But the what's telling here isn't Bauer's
irrationality, but his grim single-minded determination that the
lives of homosexuals must be miserable, and brief. Never mind what
the reality actually is. Bauer isn't concerned with what the reality
actually is. Bauer knows what the reality must be, knows what it has
to be.

To say that Bauer and his kind manufacture evidence that the
lives of homosexuals are miserable and brief, not to generate
sympathy and concern, but to generate disgust, is to state the
obvious. But look at it. Bauer isn't making an argument about the
dangers of homosexuality to homosexuals, but of the threat
homosexuals are to heterosexuals. Joshua Marshall above, gives the
perfect response of a rational man to Bauer's absurd argument, that
since promiscuity makes the lives of homosexuals so short, they
should be prevented from forming monogamous pair bonds and settling
down. Yes it's ridiculous, but only in the sense that any rational
person wants to relieve human suffering, wants to make life better
for themselves and their neighbors. But the furthest thing from
Bauer's mind is to make the lives of homosexuals better. Consider
his one and only solution to homosexuals is conversion therapy.
Bauer's solution is for homosexuals to not exist.

But of course, conversion therapy doesn't cure homosexuality, any
more then denying marriage to same sex couples discourages homosexual
promiscuity. Conversion therapy is a sham, and what is more, Bauer
and his kind know it. Look at how much time and energy they spend
on supporting conversion therapy ministries, compared to how much
they spend on anti-gay political campaigning. They couldn't be less
interested in saving homosexuals from lives that are miserable and
short, and they couldn't be more interested then they already are, in
making our lives miserable and short.

So safe sex education is wrong, not because it is imperfect, but
precisely because it would save lives...lives that, by his reckoning,
ought not to be lived in the first place. So hate crime laws are
wrong, not because they amount to thought crimes, but precisely
because they might prevent attacks on homosexuals...people who, in
his judgement, deserve it simply for existing. So making schools
safe for lesbian and gay kids is wrong, not because it interferes
with the right of Christians to denounce homosexuality, but precisely
because some gay kids might not decide to kill themselves, and
thereby spare everyone else the need to suffer another homosexual in
their midst.

What you need to bear in mind when Bauer or one of his kind wave
around some distorted fact that claims that our lives are miserable
and short, their solution to same is that homosexuals should not
exist. They proof text science the same way they proof
text the bible: not for truth, but for ammunition.

My copy of the complete Jim Henson's The Storyteller came
today from Amazon. It's a bittersweet treat. The Storyteller
was Jim Henson at his absolute best and it's a pure pleasure to
watch. But after the stories are done, and the DVD put back in its
case, and the usual crap takes its place on the TV screen, you really
realize what the world lost when Jim Henson died.

"The president believes it is important to have clarity," - White
House Press Secratary Scott McClellan

Clarity. All the gay republicans, all the gay conservatives, all the
gay average Joes, who have been saying for years that their sexuality
isn't the center of their universe, who insist that those homosexual
militants, those sexual extremists, those flaming queers have been
giving gays a bad name, who voted republican because there are more
important things in life then your sexuality, should now be able to
see with perfect clarity just what their votes have bought them.

Clarity. It doesn't matter how normal your lives otherwise are. It
doesn't matter how stable and monogamous your unions are. It doesn't
matter how much you agree with the republicans on economic issues, or
national security issues. The man you voted for just put a knife
into your heart. The people in his big tent are calling you a faggot
to your face. Clarity.

Clarity. All your hopes of winning hearts and minds by setting an
example of how normal homosexuals are. All your proud suit and tie
notions of how sexuality has nothing to do with whether someone is
liberal or conservative. But normal people of any political
persuasion don't passively accept a kick in the face. Normal people
fight back when they, their families and their loved ones are
threatened. Normal people know the difference between turning the
other cheek, and groveling. All you've shown them is that they can
piss all over you, and you'll still shake their hands afterwards.
All you've been teaching them, is that you don't think you deserve to
be treated like a normal person either. Clarity.

Forget the friendly face of the man who just told you that in his
America you can be separate, but not equal. Find a mirror and look
deeply into your own. Is that a faggot you see in there? No? Ask
yourself if you could, even now, shake George Bush's hand. All these
years you've been shaking their hands...what did they see when you
did that. Clarity.

A little something to remember, the next time you hear republicans
yap, yap, yapping about out of control judges who don't follow the
law, and anarchy in San Francisco...

Washington's conservative activists have found a traitor in their
midst, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch. The
occasion is Memogate, the internal Senate investigation into
whether Republican aides unethically (and perhaps illegally) tapped
into Democratic computer files containing private
judicial-nomination strategy memos and leaked them to the press.
The more the story balloons in the media, embarrassing Republicans
and distracting them from trying to confirm more judges, the more
right-wing activists savage Hatch, the man they hold responsible
for it. To them, the Utah Republican has done something "acutely
damaging to the struggle to get conservative judges onto the
federal bench," as one National Review writer put it this week, in
a column widely e-mailed among disgusted activists. Another
activist ominously warned in the Washington Post of a
"thermonuclear" punishment for Hatch. Also in the Post, Gary Bauer
fumed over a "demoralized Republican base around the country" and
sounded about ready to stage a public hanging on Capitol
Hill.

No matter that Hatch has spent the past three years fighting
nonstop to confirm George Bush's judicial nominees. After Hatch
declared himself "mortified" by the file-stealing allegations and
said he supported a formal investigation, angry GOP activists?who
want to downplay down the scandal?accused him of being a weak-kneed
appeaser of Democrats. The National Review's Timothy P. Carney even
likened him to Neville Chamberlain.

That's madness, of course. Under Bush, Hatch has fought bitterly
with Democrats over judicial nominations, to the point of
shattering an emerging reputation he'd gained for moderation and
spoiling some of his old bipartisan friendships. If anything, the
real story of Orrin Hatch's recent career is the way the Bush
administration took a senator who had been growing mellower and
more independent with age and reduced him to a crude partisan
attack dog. Yet even Hatch's partisanship isn't enough for the
Savonarolas of the right. The right-wing bile over Hatch's Memogate
burst of conscience only shows how frighteningly militant
Washington's church of conservatism has become.

Dig it. The feral republicans are angry that a fellow republican
called for an investigation into the breaking of some fairly
non-trivial federal laws against computer hacking...because that
investigation is getting in the way of their stacking the federal
courts. And they're so angry at him that they're going to go
"thermonuclear" on him as punishment. Swell. So what kind of people
do people who retaliate against squealers nominate as judges?

George Bush, in less the a single term, has given the republican
party completely over to thugs, whose leaders have the moral
character of organized crime bosses. They are no different from the
inner city drug lords who put the hit out on anyone who rats to the
police, except their houses are bigger, their contempt for the law
vastly bigger, and their conscience several orders of magnitude
smaller. Oh...and they get to pick the judges. When these
republicans say that a judge is out of control, what they mean is
that they aren't owned by the party.

[Edited]

[UPDATE] Just so we understand that what those Republican
aides are accused of is a crime...this just in from CNet:

A U.S. federal court sentenced Andrew Garcia, a former employee of
monitor maker ViewSonic, to a one-year prison term for using other
employees' passwords to break into the company's system, after he
had been fired. The 39-year-old network administrator pleaded
guilty in October to a single count of accessing a protected
computer and causing damage.

Four senators have expressed concern that the actions of a new
Republican appointee, who pulled references to discrimination based
on sexual orientation off an agency's Internet site, are at odds
with statements he made as part of his confirmation
hearing.

...

During his confirmation, Bloch was asked to respond in writing to a
series of questions from Akaka.

At one point, Bloch said that "sexual conduct can clearly fall
within the definition of conduct that is not adverse to the
on-the-job performance of an employee, applicant or performance of
others. I will not be selective in enforcement based on the
orientation of an individual whose personal sexual conduct is at
issue, and assure you that I will enforce the law as passed by
Congress and interpreted by the Courts with complete
impartiality."

Akaka asked, "Do you agree with the advice provided by OSC that, if
'Supervisor Joe fires Employee Jack because he saw Employee Jack at
a local Gay Pride Day event,' such firing constitutes an example of
discrimination against the employee that is unlawful?"

Bloch said cases must be judged on specific facts, but added that
he agreed such a firing would be prohibited by the law.

Oh...did I forget to mention that the positions I hold right now,
won't necessarily be the ones I hold while in office, and weren't
necessarily the ones I held the moment before I walked into this
committee room...? My bad...

My grandmother on my mother's side used to live with us when I was a
kid. She was a sour Yankee Baptist lady who burned my comic books
and scolded me whenever I used words like "darn" or "gosh darn". The
only times I ever saw her happy was when she was listening to her
radio preachers tell her how sinful and god forsaken humanity was,
and when she was watching her soap operas.

She'd watch "As The World Turns" and "General Hospital" and god knows
what else during the afternoon while I was in school, and if it had
been anyone else but her I'd have wondered what the hell the
fascination was in watching your average everyday ordinary people
being relentlessly cruel and miserable to each other. But this was
the lady who taught me what a misanthrope is.

Which brings me to Cavalcade of Boys six. "I mean, this is a romance
comic, isn't it?" Uh, no. For it to be a romance, its author would
have to actually believe in romance, and let's face it, you don't.
This is soap opera. Degrading yes...but what the
heck...heterosexuals have been spitting on themselves in their soap
operas for just about forever, so why should they have all the fun.

That gay morality barometer should have clued me in, but I swear I
thought it was tongue in cheek. Heh...no it wasn't. You had me
going with issue five, particularly those flashbacks where even
Gordon, your standard issue pathetic ugly older gay guy troll
(ewww...he's got a tooth missing and everything...) can actually be
seen as something somewhat resembling a human. I thought for a
moment that you were going to actually start saying something worth
hearing about the struggle to love and be loved, and how to hold on
to your humanity even when your family hates your guts, and everyone
you ever took into your arms has taken advantage of you and laughed
while they did it. But no. You don't believe in it. The scenes
where your characters are being cheap to each other are full of
energy. The scenes where you make a few gestures toward love are
halfhearted and that's being generous. At the end of issue six, the
guy who did the right thing is in therapy.

I know...I know...life isn't just blue sky and roses. But a comic
book isn't life, it's art. It's a statement, trivial though it may
be, about life and existence and how much you reckon either one is
worth. Not all that much, huh? Oscar Wilde said once that we're all
in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. No. We are
not all in the gutter. But those who are, who keep their eyes on the
stars, will eventually find their way out. The rest never will.
What you're saying to your readers is the gutter is real, the stars
aren't. Nice work.

Young Bottoms in Love is an absolutely great title. And I realized
after putting down issue six of Cavalcade, that everything in Young
Bottoms In Love that ever spoke to me, wasn't done by you. Some of
the artists in that title believe. Enough to make it really shine.
Enough to make you feel after you put it down, that you can take any
crap the world wants to throw at homosexuals, because loving and
being loved, and all the awe and wonder of loving and being loved,
are worth it. Are you sure you want to keep producing it?

A newly arrived Republican appointee has pulled references to
sexual orientation discrimination off an agency Internet site where
government employees can learn about their rights in the
workplace.

The Web pages at the Office of Special Counsel, an independent
agency whose mission is to protect whistleblowers and other federal
employees from retribution, has removed references to sexual
orientation from a discrimination complaint form, training slides,
a brochure titled "Your Rights as a Federal Employee" and other
documents.

Scott J. Bloch, the agency head, said he ordered the material
removed because of uncertainty over whether a provision of civil
service law applies to federal workers who claim unfair treatment
because they are gay, bisexual or heterosexual.

"It is wrong to discriminate against any federal employee, or any
employee, based on discrimination," Bloch said. But, he added, "it
is wrong for me, as a federal government official, to extend my
jurisdiction beyond what Congress gives me in the actual
interpretation of the statutes."

Sorry...but my hands are tied. And if they aren't, then they ought
to be...

Elaine Kaplan, who served as the Clinton administration's special
counsel, said references were added to complaint forms and
training materials as part of an overhaul of the agency's
information and outreach efforts.

"It seemed to us that this was well-established law," she said.
"Part of the job of the agency is to educate employees about
their rights."

Kaplan said the old Civil Service Commission issued a bulletin to
agencies in 1973 stating that agencies could not declare a person
unsuitable for employment merely because the person was gay or
engaged in homosexual acts. Ten years later, she said, the
assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel at the
Justice Department concluded federal employees, even those in law
enforcement, could not be fired solely for being gay.

Does anyone...I mean besides kooks like Steve Miller...still
seriously believe that republicans are no worse then democrats on gay
rights issues..or even better? Oh I know...I know...there are more
important things in life besides sex. Economic things. Like...having
a job and being able to pay your bills for instance...

I hear a lot of right wingers and their useful idiots in the punditry
yap, yap, yapping about how San Francisco is defying the rule of law
by issuing same sex marriage licenses. Funny how I don't hear them
bellyaching about this:

A Virginia Beach man has been sentenced to six months in jail for
trying to pick up an undercover police officer in the restroom of a
department store

Joel D. Singson was sentenced under Virginia's sodomy law. Even
though the US Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws last year
(story) Virginia interprets the ruling to exclude sex in a public
place.

Circuit Judge Frederick B. Lowe Tuesday sentenced Singson to three
years in prison for one count of solicitation to commit a felony.
The judge suspended all but six months of the sentence and set an
appeal bond of $5,000. The maximum sentence in Virginia for
approaching someone for sex in public place is five years in
prison.

The case has gained national attention because of the state's
continued use of its sodomy law and allegations it is only applied
to gay men.

You could argue that there is a distinction to be drawn between sex
in public and in private, but that's also beside the point.
What Virginia is doing is continuing to prosecuting sodomy law
offenses, despite the fact that those laws were ruled
unconstitutional, in part because they singled out gay people for
unequal treatment under the law. Virginia state republicans insist,
defiantly, that they have the right, regardless, to specifically
penalize homosexual sex differently, and more harshly, then
heterosexual sex, and are not only still enforcing Virginia's sodomy
laws, they are handing out jail sentences. I'll bet a lot of them
used to chant "massive resistance" too, once upon a time...

Via
TBogg,
the spectacle of Lileks bellyaching about how violent films just
don't treat their audiences very nice:

If I go to hell I intend to look up Quentin Tarantino and have a
few words about how he used that song in "Reservoir Dogs." Jerk.
Who gave him permission to take this song and make us think of
someone splashing gasoline on a bloody ear?

Okay...let me get this straight... Lileks actually watched
Reservoir Dogs and now he's upset about some of the violent
content of it? Well if Tarantino's a jerk then you're a drooling
moron Lileks because that's like complaining about how flaming hot the
food got after you doused it with a spoonful of what was in that
tiny little bottle of Uncle Beelzebub's New Orleans Make The Devil
Cry sauce.

I've never watched Reservoir Dogs. I still get
misty-eyed at the end of Casablanca, a film I've watched I
don't know how many times, so I sorta figured when it was first
released, that Reservoir Dogs wasn't my kind of film. I
watched The Godfather, and while I admired the film maker's
art, I didn't much care for the story. Gangster films can
be an interesting look into the world of human low-lifes, but anyone
who thinks they're actually looking into the dark side of the human
soul in a gangster film, is just a tourist in Disneyland.

You want to look into the Pit, try making sense of this:

Man says he killed son to spite wife
The Associated Press, June 28, 1999

FRANKLIN, Ind. - On Father's Day, Amy Shanabarger found her
chubby-cheeked infant son, Tyler, face-down and dead in his
crib.Two days later - just hours after the tot's funeral - her
husband gave police a confession saying that not only did he kill
his son, he planned the crime even before the child was conceived
as a way of exacting revenge against his wife.

Shanabarger said he planned to make Amy feel the way he did when
his father died. He married her, got her pregnant, allowed time for
her to bond with the child, and then took his (boy's) life.

He said it was revenge because Amy, before they were married, had
refused to cut short a vacation trip to comfort him when his father
died in 1996.

"Shanabarger said he planned to make Amy feel the way he did when
his father died. He married her, got her pregnant, allowed time for
her to bond with the child, and then took his (boy's) life,"
according to an affidavit prosecutors filed to support a murder
charge.

What kind of person does a thing like that? Or this:

Father Who Killed Sons Finds Way to Deepen Their Mother's
Grief
By Rick Bragg
The New York Times
February 4, 2001

MEMPHIS - First, the killer took her two children and now,
prosecutors say, he teases her with the hope that she could have
one back.

Alex Ware murdered his two toddler sons by leaving them to die in a
landscape of swamp, levees and lonely gravel roads, an Arkansas
jury decided last month, a crime that sickened veteran police
officers and prosecutors.

Mr. Ware killed them, Arkansas prosecutors said, to take revenge on
the boys' mother, Chantilly Harrell, 21, after she said she did not
want to be with him.

As revenge goes, it seemed complete. It seemed there was little
else that the 35-year-old Mr. Ware could do to hurt the mother of
his children.

But in his trial in Forrest City, Ark., prosecutors said, he found
a way. He teased her with hope, saying that one of the children,
the one whose body was never found, was alive in a city far away,
being kept by a woman no one has found.

Ms. Harrell, who said she hated him for what he did to her, says
she has to believe.

"If I give up on that, what do I have?"

Gangster films hold no special appeal to me. Gangsters just want
your money...or maybe your life if they feel like that too. But
there are people walking this earth who will put a different kind of
knife in your heart, for the pleasure of watching all the joy and
wonder that was possible to you drain slowly from your face, and
leave you empty. Consider Ohio, which recently (see below) not only
passed a redundant ban on same sex marriage, but whose republican
lawmakers couldn't just leave it at that, but went further,
prohibiting even hospital visitation and bereavement leave for same
sex couples. So, now in Ohio, if one half of a gay couple dies, the
state's offical position is that the other's grief does not exist.
This is what the republicans in Ohio are calling a statement of
"strong public policy".

The republicans who did this, they knew exactly what knife they were
putting in some nameless gay person's heart, and that was their
purpose, never mind the self serving rhetoric about the sanctity of
marriage. This was about putting the knife in someone's heart, and
right at the moment when that heart is already wounded and grieving,
and twisting it, just because they are homosexual. If you think a
little time spent watching gangster flicks is telling you anything
about the struggle between good and evil, you are drinking from the
bottle marked 'lite'. Reservoir Dogs, Sopranos and Godfathers aren't
shit.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Gov. Bob Taft approved one of the country's
most-far reaching gay-marriage bans on Friday, saying its adoption
was urgent because the nation's first legally sanctioned same-sex
weddings could take place as early as this spring in
Massachusetts.

Taft, a Republican, denied assertions that the law promotes
intolerance. He said the new law would send a strong positive
message to children and families.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Opponents of the state school board's new lesson
plans on evolution expect to lobby heavily for changes before a
final board vote.

The state school board voted 13-4 on Tuesday in favor of lesson
plans that some scientists say continue to contain inaccurate
information about evolution. Proponents say the plans are some of
the country's most rigorous in favor of evolution.

Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote
board president Jennifer Sheets on Monday to express concerns that
parts of the alternative concept of "intelligent design" were being
incorporated into the plans.

Intelligent design is the idea that life is so complex that it was
designed by a non-specified power.

Taft, a Republican, will not get involved in the board's decision,
spokesman Orest Holubec said Tuesday. Governors appoint six of the
board's 18 members.

Homophobia and Fundamentalism. Homophobia and Fundamentalism.
Cut from one cloth...

I have this other friend, who wonders how the hell I can stand
driving through the southwestern deserts all by myself in a
little compact car year after year. It would drive him crazy he says.
But...you see...out there, being alone isn't as hard to understand.
Of course I'm alone...I'm in the fucking desert...

Mr. Byrne "declines" to accept studies that show that kids raised by
same sex couples are in general, no different from kids raised by
opposite sex couples. He tells us that his reasoning and experience,
which I take to mean his gut level feelings on the matter, tell him
otherwise. He goes on to say at the end of his column that "in the
interest of civil debate" we should agree that a person defending
traditional marriage shouldn't be called a bigot.

Let me say that, "in the interest of civil debate", people shouldn't
accuse homosexuals of being a threat to children without any evidence
to back that up.

Sorry for the lack of activity here. I'm back in one piece from
California, but I seem to have brought with me a nasty little flu.
It's been kicking me in the head for the past several days now.

This is why I get the shot every year. Not that I'm at any
particular risk of complications, I just don't like getting socked in
for a week at a time or more with fevers and aches and that draining
of all your energy from your body like it was wrung out sponge
feeling. I hate it. I suppose I should count my blessings that at
fifty flu is the worst thing I've ever had to hate (I had the
Scarlet Fever when I was a very wee lad, but I don't remember much
of it). The actual symptoms aren't really that unendurable (unless
nausea is part of the mix anyway), but the damn things just drag on
and on. And of course the yearly flu shot only protects you from one
of several possible strains, so of course you're still as likely as
ever to pick up any of the others.

I'll post more later, when I can look at a crt for longer
periods of time without that burning eyeball sensation...

[UPDATE] Getting a ten out of ten on your first homework
assignment of the semester can make you feel a lot better...

I see that president stonewalling the 9-11 commission is calling for
an inquiry into that little gosh no weapons of mass destruction
after all situation.

To Repeat: The same man who still employs someone who leaked the
identity of a CIA agent in revenge for her husband's telling the
world that yellowcake is a synonym for crock of shit is calling for
an inquiry into what went wrong with intelligence on Iraq.

To Repeat: The same man whose underlings routinely re-write the
findings of various government science committees to suit their
political agendas is calling for an inquiry into what went wrong
with intelligence on Iraq.

To Repeat: The same man whose press secretary said that 92
million Americans will receive an average tax cut of $1,083, is
calling for an inquiry into what went wrong with intelligence on
Iraq.

To Repeat: The same man whose Park Service appointee is stocking the
Grand Canyon Visitor's Center with creationist literature that claims
the canyon was created by Noah's flood, is calling for an inquiry
into what went wrong with intelligence on Iraq.

To Repeat: The same man whose vice president is still claiming that
those Iraqi trailers were for making biological weapons, is calling
for an inquiry into what went wrong with intelligence on Iraq.

To Repeat: The same man who just said the other day that the war was
justified because Sadam wouldn't let the weapons inspectors in, is
calling for an inquiry into what went wrong with intelligence on
Iraq.

I'm sure he'll leave no stone turned. Congress should just
appropriate the money for Republican National Committee press
releases and be done with it. I'm sure DeLay and Frist would vote
for it. And I'll bet quite a few capital hill democrats would too.

I'm at a software developer's conference at Redondo Beach, California
and will be pretty busy with it for most of this week. We're trying
to figure out how to live in a world where managers want software
engineers to use more off the shelf stuff as a way to cut software
development expenses. From what I've been able to tell so far, the
cost of making various third party components work together in
peace love and understanding almost completely negates any savings
you get from not developing the software yourself.

In the meantime, I'm back in the land of my birth, and every time I
come out here I go away longing to live here even more. I'm not sure
that'll ever happen though, since the job market for software
engineers here can't be all that great since the Bush Bust, and
housing costs are as unbelievable as D.C.'s. I don't want to go
back to renting. And as long as I have a job with the Space
Telescope Science Institute, I'm not leaving Baltimore.

When I arrived at the hotel, I discovered that Rodondo Beach
was hosting a Super Bowl 10k run...the start and finish lines of
which were right in front of the hotel. The conference I am
attending wasn't to start until after the run was over, probably due
to the fact that the streets around it were all blocked off (side
note: a friend of mine expressed amazement that my conference was
starting on Super Bowl Sunday. "We're computer geeks," was my
response.) Here's a few shots of what I saw.

Good article in the current issue of The Washington Monthly, titled
Creative Class War,
it takes a look at the whole "red state" verses "blue state"
political split from a point of view that is almost universally
ignored, but which I think strikes right at the root of it. The
author, Richard Florida, begins by talking about a visit to Peter
Jackson's new film complex, where he filmed his Lord of the
Rings trilogy:

When I visited, I met dozens of Americans from places like Berkeley
and MIT working alongside talented filmmakers from Europe and Asia,
the Americans asserting that they were ready to relinquish their
citizenship. Many had begun the process of establishing residency
in New Zealand.

Think about this. In the industry most symbolic of America's
international economic and cultural might, film, the greatest
single project in recent cinematic history was internationally
funded and crafted by the best filmmakers from around the world,
but not in Hollywood...

Florida goes on to write about two looming problems on America's
horizon that are not the destruction of decades long friendships and
alliances and the good will of the rest of the industrial
world brought about by president AWOL, and not the trillions of
dollars of future debt brought about by president smirking fratboy
jackass, but the flight of creative talent from America to other
more hospitable lands, and worse, the near complete halt of
talent coming into America, in search not simply of the freedom to
create, but of a place where creativity is valued.

Roger Pederson is one of the leading researchers in the field of
stem cells. But in 2001, he left his position at the University of
California, San Francisco, to take up residency at the Centre for
Stem Cell Biology Medicine at Cambridge University in the United
Kingdom. His departure illustrates how the creative economy is
being reshaped--by our competitors growing savvy and by our own
cluelessness. Pederson bolted because the British government
aggressively recruited him, but also because the Bush
administration put heavy restrictions on stem-cell research. "I
have a soft spot in my heart for America," he recently told Wired
magazine. "But the U.K. is much better for this research.... more
working capital." And, he continued, "they haven't made such a
political football out of stem cells."

Stem cells are vital to the body because of their ability to
develop any kind of tissue. Scientists play a similar role in the
economy; their discoveries (silicon circuitry, gene splicing) are
the source of most big new industries (personal computers,
biotechnology). Unfortunately, Roger Pederson's departure may be
among the first of many. "Over the last few years, as the
conservative movement in the U.S. has become more entrenched, many
people I know are looking for better lives in Canada, Europe, and
Australia," a noted entymologist at the University of Illinois
emailed me recently. "From bloggers and programmers to members of
the National Academy I have spoken with, all find the Zeitgeist
alien and even threatening. My friend says it is like trying to
research and do business in the 21st century in a culture that
wants to live in the 19th, empires, bibles and all. There is an
E.U. fellowship through the European Molecular Biology Laboratory
in Amsterdam that everyone and their mother is trying to get."

The contempt for art and artists among the reactionaries and
fundamentalists that are now the aggregate bedrock of the feral
republican party is well known. What is not perhaps as well
understood, is that not all art is dance, and paint on canvas and
bronze statuary, and not all artists work in media that is purely
expressive. There is a subtle but profound likeness in the practice
of both art and science. In science and technology, as well as
purely artistic expressionism, the creative mind restlessly explores,
investigates, and outrages entrenched dogmas, and for generations
America was a place where the creative mind was not only welcome, but
enshrined as part of our folklore. In it's war on elites,
intellectual and artistic, the American right is systematically
fouling the environment that sustains and nurtures the practices of
art and science. There are consequences.

For several years now, my colleagues and I have been measuring the
underlying factors common to those American cities and regions with
the highest level of creative economic growth. The chief factors
we've found are: large numbers of talented individuals, a high
degree of technological innovation, and a tolerance of diverse
lifestyles. Recently my colleague Irene Tinagli of Carnegie Mellon
and I have applied the same analysis to northern Europe, and the
findings are startling. The playing field is much more level than
you might think. Sweden tops the United States on this measure,
with Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark close behind. The United
Kingdom and Belgium are also doing well. And most of these
countries, especially Ireland, are becoming more creatively
competitive at a faster rate than the United States.

It's a global economy, as they're fond of saying. But what happens
when it's not just jobs, but talent, that starts going abroad?

Thanks to the GOP takeover of Washington, and the harsh realities
of the Big Sort [migrations of the creative class to the more
tolerant blue states, while cultural conservatives migrate to
the red states], economically lagging parts of the country now
wield ultimate political power, while the creative
centers--source of most of America's economic growth--have
virtually none. Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer
speak for Silicon Valley and Hollywood. New York's Charles
Schumer and Hillary Clinton, also Democrats, represent New York's
finance and publishing industries. Washington State, home to
Starbucks and Microsoft, has two Democratic senators, Patty
Murray and Maria Cantwell. Boston's Route 128 and Washington's
high-tech Maryland suburbs are also represented by Democratic
senators. It's hard to understate how little influence these
senators have with the Bush White House and in the GOP-controlled
Congress.

You don't have to be a Democrat to recognize that the political
polarization of America and GOP dominance of Washington are not
necessarily good news for America's economic future.

To which the American right would say, "so what?" For the same
reason poor white racists will reliably vote into power politicians,
who they know will keep them poor and their children
illiterate, so long as they share their racist views, the American
right will cheerfully accept a banana republic America, that lowers
their standard of living year after year after year, so long as their
government keeps the faces of anyone with a shred of creativity and
intellectual curiosity shoved firmly in the dirt.

As long as the elites are held down, or driven out, they're happy.
The elites, the intellectuals, the scientists, the artists, and
anyone who loves life, and existence.

Telecommuting and Linux. With my work being what it is, I can do
most of it from home, and thankfully the Institute allows that,
particularly on days when the driving is hazardous. So for the past
couple days I've been plinking away at home, on machines running
Linux.

Linux works well for the telecommuting I do, since most of it
involves sessions on various Unix servers at work, and Unix talks to
Linux a lot better then it talks to Windows. Linux also does one
other thing which has come in handy the past few days: it doesn't run
Windows viruses. I've been getting swarmed by the latest one, and
just deleting them as they come in.

You could argue that it's only because Linux isn't as widely used as
Windows, that I don't have to worry much about viruses. And that's
true to a point. But Windows evolved from little single application
running on single machine DOS, and the DOS point of view is still
painfully rooted in the way Windows looks at the world. The usual
way people run Windows, even on NT, is to give their account all
the super user privileges, which the applications you run often
expect that you have while you're running them. On Linux, as well
as Unix, you don't log in as root unless you have to do some
specific thing as root. Otherwise you're logged in as a user who
can't do things like edit the password file, or write to sensitive
areas of the directory tree.

The thing you struggle with most while learning to do things on
Linux, if you're coming from Windows, is the fact that you aren't god
when you're logged in, unless you're logged in as root. So many
things you just assume you can do you can't until you give the system
that magic password. What the hell do you mean I can't just install
that program? What do you mean I can't edit that file? Why won't
this damn thing let me change my network configuration? Where the
hell is my traceroute!? Oh...right...I need to be root to do that...
For a while it just drives you nuts. But you get used to it, and
after a while the new worldview starts taking root, so to speak, and
you start doing things the Unix way. Then you sit back and watch the
Windows virus-of-the-week unable to accomplish anything, like you at
first, and you kinda start liking it.

And the original
that just ticked me off enough to spend a few
moments rewriting its text. (Sorry, but this Send-A-Card page was the
only place I could find with anything that looked like a perma
link...)

I reworked some of the text in this week's cartoon a tad. Serves me
right for trying to hand letter everything late yesterday evening.
After I scanned it in and looked at it on the screen I remembered why
I don't hand letter my drawings. I was up very late re-doing almost
all the text the way I usually do. This morning when I looked at it
again, I wasn't quite satisfied with it, so when I got home today I
fixed a few things.

I'm still not completely happy, but that's mostly because I was
experimenting this week with a technique I hope works better for
printing processes that can't quite reproduce the various shading and
texturing things I do in charcoal. If you noticed a slight
difference in the style this week, that's why. The cartoon turned
out pretty much as I expected, but the greese crayon technique I
used is one I am not comfortible with. Maybe if I had more time to
practice I could get better at cross-hatching, but my hand just
doesn't seem to want to do that. (For a sample of really awesome
cross-hatching, try
Ben Sargent's Cartoons
at the Universal Cartoon site)
Why I'm experimenting with this I'll reveal at a later date. In the
meantime, don't worry, I'll be back to my usual tricks week after
next.

Week After Next...you say? Yeah. I'll be going to a software
engineer's conference at the end of the week and between deadlines at
work and getting ready for it I won't have time to do next week's
cartoon. Cartoons will resume the week after.

I put out bird feeders, not so much because I think I'm necessary to
their survival, as that I just like watching birds. But when there
is snowfall, like today for instance, I make an extra effort to get
something out there for them. Sometimes I forget how high up the
food chain I'm feeding.

Last night the forecasters were calling for between 4 and six inches
of snow here in Baltimore, so I put food out before I went to bed.
When I got up this morning I glanced outside and saw my neighborhood
was covered in snow, and my feeders were covered with birds, which were
zooming every which way around the tree in my front yard where I hang
them.

I decided to shovel my sidewalk before I left for work, since it's
best to get the stuff when it's still soft and fluffy. As I stepped
outside, I noticed that there were no birds anywhere, but I was too
busy thinking about the work I have to do today to pay attention. I
shovelled my way down my front steps, and turned slightly to begin
shovelling my sidewalk. I caught a movement from the corner of my
eye. Suddenly this large winged shadow pounced down on a snowbank,
no further then three feet from me, and I heard this pitiful little
squeal. By the time I'd turned my head to look, the hawk was already
about five feet back into the air and climbing, with one of my little
house finches in its talons.

Oh...so that was why it was so quiet out here... It was a
pretty audacious move for the hawk, since I was right there whipping
around this big metal snow shovel, well within reach of where it
landed. Not that I would have swung at it, I admire raptors. But it
took a chance. On the other hand, had I wanted to smack it I
probably couldn't have anyway, since it was already well out of my
reach again, by the time I turned to look at it. I never knew it was
there, but you can be sure it was watching both me and its intended
target before it made its move. Maybe it saw its chance when I
turned my back.

And human with a shovel or no, I'm sure the sight of food sticking
out like a sore thumb on that snowbank was irresistible. House
finches look about like sparrows with their heads dipped in raspberry
sauce. Most months of the year, like sparrows, they're hard to see
while they're on the ground. A hawk would have to watch for
movement. Thinking it over while I walked in to work, I realized
that snow probably doesn't make life difficult for hawks. Just the
opposite I think. Anything moving around in the snow might as well
have a bulls-eye painted on it.

City life isn't all rats and pigeons. We've got pidgeons all right,
but I've only seen one rat since I moved here. I've seen two
different kinds of hawk and one falcon in my yard in just a
tad over two years. That's not counting the big, red shouldered
hawks we have in the woods by the Institute.

The AAS issued a press release supporting the congressional call to
review the cacellation of Hubble servicing mission 4. They don't
seem to have the press release on their web site yet, but a PDF
version was circulated to all staff at the Space Telescope Science
Institute late yesterday. You can read it
here.

Some sembalance of contact with Spirit has reestablished. At least,
now it's not gibbering:

NEWS RELEASE: 2004-30

Mars Exploration Rover Updated Mission Status

The flight team for NASA's Spirit received data from the rover in
a communication session that began at 13:26 Universal Time (5:26
a.m. PST) and lasted 20 minutes at a data rate of 120 bits per
second.

"The spacecraft sent limted data in a proper response to a ground
command, and we're planning for commanding further communication
sessions later today," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager
Pete Theisinger at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif.

The flight team at JPL had sent a command to Spirit at 13:02
Universal Time (5:02 PST) via the NASA Deep Space Network antenna
complex near Madrid, Spain, telling Spirit to begin transmitting.

Meanwhile, the other Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity is on
course to land halfway around Mars from Spirit, in a region called
Meridiani Planum, on Jan. 25 (Universal Time and EST; Jan. 24 at
9:05 p.m. PST).

Dr. Beckwith sent a new email to all staff today, outlining some of
the initiatives now going on regarding the future of the Hubble
Space Telescope. I'm not going to quote it verbatim here, but I'll
give you some of what struck me as important and interesting in
it.

Interest now is in making sure that nothing irrevocable is done
regarding our ability to support a future servicing mission,
should NASA, for whatever reason, decide to revisit this decision.
I've said before that I don't think there is any possibility that
this white house will change it's mind, for reasons I've somewhat
elaborated on previously, and will again soon. But this is a wise
move nonetheless. No point in starting to dismantle our
infrastructure until we have no choice.

A team of our best engineers is being assembled to work on
technical ideas assuming no SM4. There will be communications
channels into and out of the committee established, so that ideas
can be suggested, and regular reports about the brain storming and
the technical viability of possible courses of action can be shared.
At one end of the spectrum, they are looking at possible: robotic
servicing, remote manipulator servicing, human servicing by countries
such as Russia) to extend the life of HST as originally planned. On
the other end of the spectrum, assuming no more visits before a
de-orbiting mission, they will look at the ways and means of
extending the life of the observatory (e.g. cycling the power off at
night to conserve batteries, going immediately to 2-gyro mode to
preserve the gyros...and so forth)

We will be looking into other possible work to bridge the gap between
the end of Hubble and the launch of the Next Generation Space
Telescope. Some near term opportunities will be revisited and their
feasibility reassessed in light of no SM4.

Near term staff reductions will not see a big increase. This is
because our budget had already assumed that SM4 would have happened
by fiscal year 05 (it had slipped). There are some planned staff
reductions which will take place this spring or summer and again the
following year. This is because our current budget called for
putting Hubble systems development into maintenance mode after
SM4. As I said, a few months ago we were still holding out hope
for an SM5, but it didn't seem likely, given that SM4 had slipped
and by the time it happened the work would likely make Hubble
usable for science for a bit into the next decade anyway. But now
that SM4 is not going to happen, in three years the Institute will
probably have to reduce staff by fifty percent. What remains will
maintain the Hubble archive, and do the startup work for NGST.

They will look into ways to optimize the science program under the
assumption that Hubble will no longer be able to do science in three
years (more about that in a moment). This needs wide community
involvement and will probably begin during an already scheduled May
symposium.

Bearing on the expected lifespan of Hubble, I reckon you'll be
interested in this abstract that made the rounds at work today

Without SM4, gyroscope survival is a critical factor for the HST
Mission lifetime. I present a simple Monte-Carlo model to
calculate the survival probabilities for various scenarios. I
calibrate the model to reproduce and update more accurate, but
somewhat outdated, calculations by Aerospace Corporation. Continued
three-gyroscope guiding will become impossible by late January
2006. Subsequent two-gyroscope guiding will further extend the
mission to late May 2007 (if no other hardware fails). I discuss
the importance of alternative strategies. We can extend the HST
Mission if we switch to two-gyroscope guiding sooner; this extends
the lifetime of the gyroscope that is powered off. Starting
two-gyroscope guiding by January 2005 could extend the HST Mission
by another 10 months, to April 2008. Any 6-month implementation
delay beyond January 2005 decreases the mission by 3 months. The
1-sigma uncertainty in all the aforementioned 50% probability
(median) dates ranges between 11-16 months. To achieve maximum
lifetime it is important to guide with the gyroscopes that have the
lowest failure probabilities. This strategy is important during
three-gyroscope guiding as well. I recommend that: (a) More
detailed gyroscope survival models should be calculated to validate
these results; (b) With knowledge of the individual gyroscope
failure probabilities, an effort should be made guide with the
gyroscopes for which these probabilities are lowest; (c)
Implementation and testing of the two-gyroscope guiding capability
should be expedited as much as possible; (d) A study should be
undertaken of the (net) trade-off between 13 months of
three-gyroscope observations and 23 months of two-gyroscope
observations; (e) any remote possibility of one-gyroscope guiding
should be actively investigated, since it is expected that one
functional gyroscope will be available into 2009 or beyond.

I have to say that the last time I attended a discussion of their
thinking on two-gyro mode, it looked like only a very limited amount
of science could be done in that mode. Because of the orbital
mechanics they laid out for us (and I don't do that sort of thing for
a living...I'm an applications programmer Jim, not a rocket
scientist), it looked to me that while there would be times when
Hubble could do everything it otherwise could with three gyros, most
of the time they wouldn't be able to get the kind of pointing they
needed to get the kind of data they want, and at some times they
wouldn't be able to do anything. But of course they're still working
on it.

Two days after President Bush announced a push to send a man to
Mars, NASA doomed the Hubble Space Telescope by scrubbing a shuttle
mission to upgrade the venerable instrument.

The result is an inadvertent irony. In the name of sending more
humans into space, NASA has pulled the plug on its strongest
real-world argument for doing so. Though Hubble is Earth's most
powerful eye in space, it might shut down within a few years.

...

As a research instrument, Hubble has been a staggering success.
Launched in 1991, it has helped astronomers confirm black holes,
document the life cycle of stars and age-date the universe.

As a call to space, Hubble has been even more triumphant. The
spectacular images it sent back of galaxies and our neighboring
planets pique the human imagination. Hubble's accomplishments
convey the awesomeness of space and render space exploration
immediate, meaningful and captivating. The telescope may be getting
old and creaky, but it still serves admirably as the public's
collective presence in space.

...
As politicians and technocrats try to drum up the enthusiasm
necessary to fulfill the president's immensely costly vision, they
are bound to regret having closed the public's one good eye

No they won't. During our townhall meeting at the Institute last
Friday, after we were informed of the decision, the question was
asked if NASA director Sean O'Keefe understood that NASA was going
to loose one of, if not its biggest, public relations successes.
O'Keefe we were told, knew that "he would take a hit", but he
thought it would be manageable. NASA, we were told, would have
other things to show the public, like the current pictures from
the Mars rover Spirit for example.

This white house is nothing, if not well versed in the ways and means
of manipulating public opinion. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED anyone? My
thinking is that we're going to be well down the road to dismantling
space science, and well on the way to the complete militarization of
space, before the costs of the decisions made by this white house
this month start dawning on the general public. Then, as in Iraq,
the argument will become, well...we've gone this far...now we
can't go back.

A little something to think about, whenever you see on of those new
"Community Friendly" WalMart ads on your TV...

"My ankle was crushed," Mr. Rodriguez said, explaining he had been
struck by an electronic cart driven by an employee moving stacks of
merchandise. "I was yelling and running around like a hurt dog that
had been hit by a car. Another worker made some phone calls to
reach a manager, and it took an hour for someone to get there and
unlock the door."

The reason for Mr. Rodriguez's delayed trip to the hospital was a
little-known Wal-Mart policy: the lock-in. For more than 15 years,
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has locked in
overnight employees at some of its Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores.
It is a policy that many employees say has created disconcerting
situations, such as when a worker in Indiana suffered a heart
attack, when hurricanes hit in Florida and when workers' wives have
gone into labor.

...

Janet Anderson, who was a night supervisor at a Sam's Club in
Colorado from 1996 to 2002, said that many of her employees were
also airmen stationed at a nearby Air Force base. Their commanders
sometimes called the store to order them to report to duty
immediately, but she said they often had to wait until a manager
arrived around 6 a.m. She said one airman received a reprimand from
management for leaving by the fire door to report for duty.

Ms. Anderson also told of a worker who had broken his foot one
night while using a cardboard box baler and had to wait four hours
for someone to open the door. She said the store's managers had
lied to her and the overnight crew, telling them the fire doors
could not be physically opened by the workers and that the doors
would open automatically when the fire alarm was triggered.

Only after several years as night supervisor did she learn that she
could open the fire door from inside, she said, but she was told
she faced dismissal if she opened it when there was no fire. One
night, she said, she cut her finger badly with a box cutter but
dared not go out the fire exit — waiting until morning to get 13
stitches at a hospital.

The federal government and almost all states do not bar locking in
workers so long as they have access to an emergency exit. But
several longtime Wal-Mart workers recalled that in the late 1980's
and early 1990's, the fire doors of some Wal-Marts were chained
shut.

Wal-Mart officials said they cracked down on that practice after an
overnight stocker at a store in Savannah, Ga., collapsed and died
in 1988. Paramedics could not get into the store soon enough
because the employees inside could not open the fire door or front
door, and there was no manager with a key.

"We certainly do not do that now," Ms. Williams said. "It's not
been that way for a long time."

"We certainly do not do that now..." Well that's really swell.
It's staringly obvious that people who set policies like this,
do so without ever once considering how they would like working under
those kinds of conditions themselves. People you feel perfectly free
to physically lock up inside your stores aren't your associates,
they're your inmates.

This is why we have labor laws. I have never considered myself a
socialist, but my dalliance with libertarianism ended on precisely
this note during the Reagan years, when I saw scores of decent, hard
working, struggling people beaten down like pack animals by
corporations, not so much from runaway greed as complete and
utter indifference to their humanity. I believe in the marketplace.
But if you make your money by exploiting helpless people at the edge
of survival, then you're no businessman, you're a leach, and your
money is poison. Any company that so obviously treats its employees
like chattel, can only be managed by a bunch of goons who know the
price of everything, and the value of nothing. Think about that, the
next time you see a WalMart commercial touting how much they care
about the communities they serve.

"I think the new initiative is driven by a desire to beat the Chinese
to the moon," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a
defense and space policy research group.

Among companies that could cash in on Bush's space plans are Lockheed
Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., which do big
business with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as
well as with the Pentagon.

The moon, scientists have said, is a source of potentially unlimited
energy in the form of the helium 3 isotope -- a near perfect fuel
source: potent, non-polluting and causing virtually no radioactive
by-product in a fusion reactor.

"And if we could get a monopoly on that, we wouldn't have to worry
about the Saudis and we could basically tell everybody what the price
of energy was going to be," said Pike.

Gerald Kulcinski of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University
of Wisconsin at Madison estimated the moon's helium 3 would have a
cash value of perhaps $4 billion (2.23 billion pounds) a ton in terms
of its energy equivalent in oil.

Scientists reckon there are about one million tons of helium 3 on the
moon, enough to power the earth for thousands of years. The
equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 30 tons could
meet all U.S. electric power needs for a year, Kulcinski said by
e-mail.

Bush's schedule for a U.S. return to the moon matches what experts
say may be a dramatic militarisation of space over the next two
decades, even if the current ban on weapons holds.

I fixed the dates on the last couple entries. My fault. I do this
all by hand and sometimes I get a date wrong, and then it creeps into
the following posts.

I'll have my say on the cancellation of the Hubble servicing mission
later in the week. Just so you know, nobody at the Institute is
being muzzled about this. We're all free to speak our minds about
it, although obviously the Director and upper management are in more
delicate positions. I just want to make sure I say my piece about
it clearly and coherently. On the web sites I've visited where this
is being discussed, I saw a fairly immediate presupposition that this
was the usual anti-science crap that comes constantly out of this
white house, followed by a smaller wave of folks saying no,
no...this was planned all along, and Bush really had nothing to do
with it, and saying he did amounts to tinfoil hat territory.

I think the former impression is entirely correct. I'll make my case
for it here in a couple of days.

The hope among some, not just at the Institute, but all over the
world as I'm reading it, is that this decision on the part of NASA
can be changed with enough public outcry. I really doubt that, but I
don't want to discourage people from trying. By all means, contact
your elected officials about it, if you think that will be helpful.
Don't sit on your hands...we as citizens, should never just sit on
our hands when our government takes a course we disagree with. Maybe
I'm just becoming a gloomy old cuss in my middle age...but I don't
think this white house gives a good goddamn about what the public
thinks. Not when money and power are at stake.

In the meantime, I have a cartoon to finish for Monday and one to
work on which...well...if everything goes as planned I'll tell you
about later. Oh...and my Terror Alert cartoons to work on. So no
more blogging now until Monday.

The Maryland Log Cabin Quislings aren't saying anything about
governor Ehrlich's recent rant opposing everything from civil
unions to hate crime laws. How...unsurprising. According to
The Washington Blade,
when a Maryland resident sent letters to various local, state and
federal officials about gay issues, Ehrlich, responded with a
diatribe that, among other things, called hate crime laws
discriminatory, called civil unions vague and non-binding, referred
obliquely to such unions as the result of choices individuals make in
life, and said he was opposed to "Promulgating homosexuality".

Thing is...Ehrlich's hard right credentials were well known, even
before his race for the Maryland governorship. He is from the Ellen
Sauerbrey wing of the republican party here, and while in congress,
representing one of Maryland's most reactionary districts, he voted
with the right wing American Conservative Union, over 80 percent of
the time. It was a record he ran from during his race for governor,
by presenting himself to Marylanders as a whole as a moderate,
chiefly on the issues of abortion, guns and the environment. This
despite the fact that, for example, his score on conservation issues
was the lowest in the Maryland house delegation for seven years.

When Ehrlich won the governorship in 2002, his chief of staff told
the Blade after his victory that while the governor-elect was not
supportive of gay marriage, he would be open to hearing proposals
about domestic partnership registries and civil unions.

In 2002, Steve Kreseski, Ehrlich's chief of staff, said, "Some of
the other ideas -- domestic partner registries or, perhaps, civil
unions -- he would be open-minded to hearing those proposals."
Kreseski did not respond to Blade inquiries this week.

Gosh...he changed his mind pretty quickly didn't he? You have to
figure that the Log Cabiners are practicing a kind of political bug
chasing, because lately the candidates they've been endorsing have
had a pretty good record of relentlessly attacking gay and lesbian
Americans once they get into office. Deep thinker Dale Carpenter at
the Independent (sic) Gay Forum once accused Richard Goldstein of
having a nostalgia for alienation. Maybe he reckons that nostalgia is
for wimps, whereas it takes real guts to actually fight to bring
the bad old days back. If the Bush years have taught us anything so
far, it's that when a right winger offers up a few token statements
of political moderation, they're bullshitting, and probably laughing
at you while they're doing it. And as long as people are willing to
passively accept the bullshit, they have every right to laugh at
them. All the Log Cabiners needed to see through Ehrlich's bullshit,
was the pride in themselves just as they are, that Log Cabiners keep
insisting that they actually have more of, then all those left wing
militant homosexual activists. A militant homosexual is a homosexual
who doesn't think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual. A
militant homosexual activist, is a homosexual who acts like they
don't think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual.

I just got back from a town hall meeting at the Space Telescope
Science Institute, with our director Dr. Steven Beckwith. Here's
some brief notes on what we were told.

Dr. Beckwith, along with several other project leaders met with NASA
director Sean O'Keefe at Goddard this morning, where they were
informed that SM4 had been cancelled. In explaining his
decision to cancel, O'Keefe said that it was a close decision, and
that he could have made it either way, but this was the way he
decided to go. He said that the recommendations of the
Columbia Accident Investigation Board,
(CAIB), played a major role in his decision. CAIB lists several
requirements for a return to flight for the space shuttle, and the
essential points were that if the shuttle can't reach the space
station, then it must have the ability to inspect and repair itself
in orbit. Hubble is in a different orbit from the space station
(the space station orbit is more polar), and if a shuttle goes to
Hubble, it cannot reach the space station if it is in trouble.
Meeting the requirments laid down by CAIB, would require new
technology (such as a redesigned robotic arm), which would have only
been used to support Hubble servicing missions, since they have
decided now, that only Hubble and the space station are possible
missions for the space shuttles.

Finishing the space station is now a top priority in the new direction
Bush has turned NASA toward. O'Keefe said he weighed fulfilling the
requirements of CAIB in the balance against Hubble's usefulness to
science, and decided it wasn't worth it. On the one hand, there are
many astronauts who have expressed a willingness to go up and service
Hubble, even accounting for the risks. Hubble has been something the
astronauts especially, have taken great pride in working on (I've
seen this pride for myself when they've come to the institute to talk
to us about the missions with Hubble). Then there is the money
already spent on SM4...about 200-250 million dollars. Two new
instruments were scheduled to be installed on Hubble, each at about
100 million a piece to develop and build, in addition to some
maintenance work. O'Keefe estimated about 45 million would be saved,
although he insisted that the savings weren't primarily why he
cancelled the mission. Indeed, we were told, NASA had already
budgeted the money for the servicing mission, and the safety upgrades
to the shuttle fleet to service Hubble.

O'Keefe said that consideration was given to the fact that the people
working on Hubble now, represent a talent pool that should not be
lost, and could be useful in the new missions in planning, and he
suggested that other interim projects may come on line to insure that
our talent pool is not lost to NASA. He said that the decision to
cancel was his alone, and that he made it now, rather then waiting
for a return to flight, because he didn't think that the factors he
was considering would change after shuttle flights are resumed.

During our town hall meeting, Dr. Beckwith told us that for now,
Hubble was still operational and we still had a few more years of
science left in it. Our concerns now are primarily the gyros,
the batteries, and orbit decay.

The gyros, as I've said, fail in a regular and predictable pattern.
Hubble has six on board. It currently needs three to do science.
When it became clear that SM4 would likely not happen before we were
down to two gyros, the engineers began work on a scheme to do science
with only two gyros. That's still in the planning stages, and
obviously will get a lot more attention now that there will be no
more servicing missions. Desperation is the mother of invention.

The batteries are a new concern. Hubble is still working on the
original batteries, and they are somewhat past their predicted
life span. Dr. Beckwith said we are in uncharted territory
regarding them. We have no useful model of how they may behave so
far past their designed life. So this is another area the
engineers will look at, to see how much additional life we can
wring out of them. Dr. Beckwith discussed the possibility of only
doing science while the spacecraft was in the sunlit side of its
orbit. But constantly powering up and down the instruments might
only make matters worse.

Then there is the matter of the orbit. At every servicing mission,
Hubble is boosted back up a notch by the shuttle. With this no
longer a possibility, it is a certainty that the spacecraft will
enter the atmosphere before 2010, Hubble's original end of life
date. There are plans in the works to design and launch a
robotically attached retro rocket, to allow NASA to deorbit Hubble
in a controlled way. The talk I've heard around the Institute is
that the primary mirror will almost certainly survive reentry, and
depending on how it enters the atmosphere, some of the guidance
system too. Hubble uses reaction wheels for positioning, not gas
jets.

Beyond Hubble, there is the
Next Generation Space Telescope
(NGST, or as it is now called, the James Webb Space Telescope), which
is currently scheduled for launch sometime in 2011. O'Keefe said that
he will look into ways to accelerate development of NGST a tad, but
that would only bring it forward by a year at best. Then there is
the archive, which will require work past the end of Hubble. Dr.
Beckwith said he is committed to doing what he could to keeping as
much of the Hubble talent pool together for NGST. There may be other
projects we can work on in the interim. For now, he said he
wanted to make sure that our fiscal year 04 would run its course
as planned. But we do not have our offical budget yet. There have
been no stop work orders given. Yet.

That's all I have for now. I'm at home, and through the miracle of
modern computing technology, I will be working on the projects I
am responsible for at the Institute, probably for the rest of the
evening. More on what I think of all this tomorrow.

Oh...and one other thing. I don't speak for the Space Telescope
Science Institute. I only work here.

No more servicing missions to Hubble, as per the directive of the
current head of NASA, Sean O'Keefe.

Hubble has six guidance gyros. But they fail at fairly regular and
now predictable rates. Nearly every servicing mission to Hubble
has replaced gyros as part of the work done. It needs three to do
most of the science it now does, although there is a scheme in the
works to do a greatly attenuated kind of science with two. We
currently have four working gyros. Expectations were that we would
almost certainly be down to two by the time the next servicing
mission occurred, and possibly even down to one. So, figure, at
around the time of what would have been the next servicing mission,
Hubble will probably be no more, or soon, very soon, to expire.

Haven't heard yet about their final plans to control dump it.
Last I heard, the talk was that some sort of small retro would be
fitted to it via a shuttle mission, so it's re-entry into earth's
atmosphere could be controlled.

This is of a piece with Bush's directive, that anything that doesn't
support his new moon and mars missions is to be cut. So likely
Hubble won't be the only thing that does deep space science that
goes, and quite possibly some of the stuff that does near earth
science will also be trashcanned (like for instance, all the stuff
that provides data about that pesky global warming that isn't
supposed to be really happening...)

The end of an era in deep space exploration draws to a close. The
era of the total militarization of space dawns.

WASHINGTON - Under a new proposal, the White House would decide
what and when the public would be told about an outbreak of mad cow
disease, an anthrax release, a nuclear plant accident or any other
crisis.

...

Federal agencies have until Thursday to submit comments on what
they think about having their authority stripped.

There is wide concern among those in the science offices at the EPA
and Occupational Safety and Health Administration that their
agencies' responses will be based more on political realities than
on the genuine merits of the OMB's proposal.

Even those critical of the OMB's plan agree with the need for peer
review. The practice, which has been accepted for decades, demands
that before scientific, medical or technical findings can be
determined to be effective and safe for use or published in
professional journals, they must be evaluated for merit by other
specialists in the same field.

Industry has not been shy about denouncing government's system of
peer review as unfair, especially when regulators determined that
their pharmaceutical product, chemical or process must be tightly
controlled because of possible danger to the public or environment.
And the White House has been equally open about its desire to
reduce the regulatory burden on industry.

Graham said revising peer review "is a major priority for this
administration."

...

There were headlines across the country when the EPA's inspector
general confirmed that the White House's Council on Environmental
Quality had forced downplaying of actual hazards from the collapse
of the World Trade Center buildings. And the OMB was faulted in
congressional hearings for preventing the EPA from declaring a
public health emergency regarding asbestos contamination in Libby,
Mont.

"Incredibly, OMB's response to this widespread criticism about
political interference in public health decisions is to come right
out and explicitly propose to take authority over release of
emergency information away from health, safety and environmental
officials and transfer it into the hands" of John Graham, said
Winifred De Palma, regulatory affairs counsel for Public
Citizen.

...

Before joining the Bush administration, Graham headed the Harvard
Center for Risk Analysis. Its research, funded mostly by
corporations, is often widely praised by industry and denounced by
some public interest groups. Graham has written or edited books on
the problems of government peer review.

Two of Graham's own studies on the safety of cell phones and
driving and the value of automotive air bags for children are
called scientific whitewash by some critics and praised as an
unbiased evaluation by those in the automotive and cell phone
industry.

For $4,000 to $10,000 a day, trainers who are as ethically and
intellectually diverse as journalists themselves teach the art of
performing for the press. Thirty years ago many members of Congress
did not have press secretaries, let alone coaches to show them how
to behave in front of a camera. Today it's a rare public soul who
has not been media trained. The risks are higher for the untrained
person, says Joyce Newman, who heads The Newman Group, a New York
training firm: "Anything seen or said tracks you forever, and can
come back to smack you in the face." So politicians, government
bureaucrats, and as many as 70 percent of corporate CEOs are taught
how to parry reporters' questions and deliver predetermined
messages. Even flower sellers coached by the Society of American
Florists know they should talk about the color of roses when
reporters call about price gouging on Valentine's Day.

As journalism has morphed into a cog in a great public relations
machine, the fundamental relationship between journalists and their
subjects has changed, turning the craft of the interview on its
head. Where once journalists took the lead, prepared in depth for
interviews, zeroed in on specifics, and connected the dots for
their audience, those being questioned now lead the way, coached
precisely on how to wrest control. Never assume knowledge on the
part of the reporter, trainers counsel, and think of the interview
as a collaboration, not a confrontation. To that end, The CommCore
Observer, a monthly e-mail sent to clients by The CommCore
Consulting Group, one of the country's largest media training
firms, advises clients "to prepare for media interviews as if they
are educating the reporter. Much like a teacher develops a lesson
plan, the interviewee can set context, provide perspective and
control the direction of the interview."

At a time when the audience makes decisions based on perceptions
rather than facts, the goal is to create positive perceptions of
companies and their products, politicians and their policies. The
techniques, however, are the same, and the effect on the audience
is the same as well: the control of information.

He looked a reporter in the eye and casually lied that it was the
crew of the aircraft carrier, and not his staff, that made the
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner. During the primaries he flinched from
no lie about his opponants that he thought would gain him even the
slightest advantage. He fought tooth and nail to prevent the will
of the voters in Florida from ever being known. To this day he and
his supporters lie about what has been learned about Florida since.
He allowed a covert CIA agent's identity to be made public,
endangering her life and those of the people in foreign lands she
worked with, when her husband went public with the truth about the
allegations that Saddam was trying to buy nuclear material from
Africa.

If the following shocks or surprises you, then you just aren't
paying attention:

In March 2002, the Institute of Medicine found "overwhelming"
evidence that racial and ethnic minorities suffer disparities in
healthcare and concluded that "the real challenge lies not in
debating whether disparities exist . . . but in developing and
implementing strategies to reduce and eliminate them." In the
months that followed, the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) was faulted for not pursuing many of the
strategies recommended by the Institute of Medicine to counter
healthcare disparities.

On December 23, 2003, HHS released its own long-awaited National
Healthcare Disparities Report. Unlike the Institute of Medicine,
however, HHS did not describe healthcare disparities as a
national problem. In fact, the HHS report emphasized that in some
ways racial and ethnic minorities are in better health than the
general population.

At the request of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings,
Rep. Ciro D. Rodriguez, Rep. Michael M. Honda, Del. Donna M.
Christensen, Rep. Hilda L. Solis, Rep. Danny K. Davis, and Rep.
Dale E. Kildee, this report investigates why HHS reached
conclusions on healthcare disparities that differ from those of
the Institute of Medicine. The investigation is based on a
comparison of two versions of the healthcare disparities report:
(1) the final version that was released by HHS on December 23
after review by political appointees in the Department; and (2)
the draft executive summary that was prepared by HHS scientists
and widely circulated in the Department.

The investigation finds that HHS substantially altered the
conclusions of its scientists on healthcare disparities. In the
June draft, the Department's scientists found "significant
inequality" in health care in the United States, called
healthcare disparities "national problems," emphasized that these
disparities are "pervasive in our health care system," and found
that the disparities carry a significant "personal and societal
price." The final version of the report, however, contains none
of these conclusions.

This investigation finds:

The final version of the National Healthcare Disparities Report
deletes most uses of the word "disparity." The scientists'
draft defined "disparity" as "the condition or fact of being
unequal, as in age, rank, or degree" and included the term over
30 times in the "key findings" section of the executive
summary. By contrast, the final version leaves "disparity"
undefined and includes it in the "key findings" section just
twice.

The final version eliminates the conclusion that
healthcare disparities are "national problems." The scientists'
draft found that "racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities
are national problems that affect health care at all points in
the process, at all sites of care, and for all medical
conditions - in fact, disparities are pervasive in our health
care system." The final version states only that "some
socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, and geographic differences
exist."

The final version drops findings on the social costs of
disparities and replaces them with a discussion of "successes."
The scientists' draft concluded that "disparities come at a
personal and societal price," including lost productivity,
needless disability, and early death. The final version drops
this conclusion and replaces it with the finding that "some
priority populations' do as well or better than the general
population in some aspects of health care." As an example, the
executive summary highlights that "American Indians/Alaska
Natives have a lower death rate from all cancers." The
executive summary does not mention that overall life
expectancies for American Indians and Alaska Natives are
significantly shorter than for other Americans or that their
infant mortality rates are substantially higher.

The final version omits key examples of healthcare
disparities. The scientists' draft concluded that racial and
ethnic minorities are more likely to be diagnosed with
late-stage cancer, die of HIV, be subjected to physical
restraints in nursing homes, and receive suboptimal cardiac
care for heart attacks. The final version drops these examples.
The report instead highlights milder examples of healthcare
disparities, such as the finding that "Hispanics and American
Indians or Alaska Natives are less likely to have their
cholesterol checked."

They say that theirs is a moral crusade. But there is no morality
that exalts power over truth.

Truth is accepting the facts for what they are, and honestly
representing those facts to others. Jacob Bronowski wrote in
Science and Human Values, that when we discard the test of
fact in what a star is, we discard in it what we are, and that
society holds together when we respect our human identity, or it
falls apart into competing groups of fear and power when it's
concept of what we are is false.

Theory and experiment alike become meaningless unless the
scientist brings to them, and his fellows can assume in him, the
respect of a lucid honesty with himself. The mathematician and
philosopher W. K. Clifford said this forcibly at the end of his
short life, nearly a hundred years ago.

If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done by
the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or
it may even prevent him from using the money badly. But I
cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make
myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should
loose it's property, but that it should become a den of
thieves; for then it must cease to be a society. This is why we
ought not to do evil that good may come; for at any rate this
great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked
thereby.

This is the scientist's moral: that there is no distinction
between ends and means. Clifford goes on to put this in terms of
the scientist's practice:

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on
insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the
mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have
occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing
this great wrong towards man, that I make myself credulous.
The danger to society is not merely that it should believe
wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should
become credulous.

And the passion in Clifford's tone shows that to him the word
credulous had the same emotional force as 'a den of
thieves'

The fulcrum of Clifford's ethic here, and mine, is the phrase 'it
may be true after all.' Others may allow this to justify their
conduct; the practice of science wholly rejects it. It does not
admit the word 'true' can have this meaning. The test of truth
is the known factual evidence, and no glib expediency nor reason
of state can justify the smallest self-deception in that. Our
work is of a piece, in the large and in the detail; so that if we
silence one scruple about our means, we infect ourselves and our
ends together.

-Jacob Bronowski "Science and Human Values" 1956

This is exactly why they hate science. Lies are what brought them
to power. Lies are what hope will keep them in power. Lies, and
whatever fear of their power they can manage to instill in
others. Theirs is the morality of thugs and criminals. The
practice of science represents everything they loath and fear and
resent about the human status, that they themselves have long
since renounced. It empowers, because knowledge is power, whereas
in their zero sum view of life and existance, any power gained by
others, is less for themselves. Science proceeds from the
evidence, not the dictates of authority. Science is a noble
endevor, encouraging and rewarding the best within us, curiosity,
thoughtfulness, a desire to learn, a courage to follow knowledge
wherever it leads, a habit of truth. More then the contradictions
to their cherished dogmas, it is the vision of the nobility which
is possible to the human race, reminding the thugs and cheats of
the world of what they sold out, of the empty void they've made of
their inner selves, that they hate about the practice of science.
It's not just that they want the facts bent to suit their policies,
it's that they want practice of science to be finally regarded as
the heresy they have always regarded it as being: the heresy that
says there is more to life, and to what it is to be human, then
the gutter they live in.

The CPA is a total mess, as should be pretty clear. It's actually
kind of shocking. It's hard to even know where to start. You
probably know all of this: the CPA is locked inside the Green Zone,
this massive area in the heart of Baghdad that's protected by armed
guards, tanks, and lots of big concrete walls. Most of the people
in the Green Zone never leave, or only leave with massive army
escort and then only to go directly to meetings in ministries. They
call the area outside of the Green Zone, the Red Zone. In other
words: all of Iraq is the Red Zone. So, very few people in the CPA
have the slightest idea what's going through the minds of Iraqis.
They either have brief conversations with people on the street,
when they're surrounded by armed troops. Inevitably, the Iraqis
tell them they are very happy with the US occupation. What else
would they say? I never, ever meet Iraqis who are happy with the US
occupation. Or they meet with their own Iraqi staff or staff at the
ministries, who are similarly positive--sycophantic to their
bosses. The ignorance is so great that I generally find when I meet
with CPA officials they start interviewing me, because I know far
more about Iraq than they do.

...

The people of the CPA are a diverse group. Some are quite smart and
well meaning and are depressed about the way things are going.
Morale is extremely low. Some are Bush true-believers who refuse to
hear a word against the occupation, as if everything is going well.
There is open hostility between the career civil servants and the
political appointees. The political types tend to have no
experience in the Arab world, know no Arabic, have no experience
outside of the US. The CPA people who have experience in the Arab
world and have a better feel for what is going on in the street
(only a vague idea because of their limited contact) are sidelined
and don't have any power to affect CPA decisions. Those people tend
to leave quickly out of frustration.

On top of all this, there is a shocking lack of communication
within the CPA and between the CPA and the ministries they are
supposed to oversee. Nobody knows what anyone else is doing, nobody
knows what is happening in the ministries they are advising. It's
total chaos.

There are good stories happening. There are good things being done,
as Bush tries to constantly tell us. But they're not effective.
They don't affect the lives of Iraqis. For example, the sewage
system is being seriously overhauled, but it will be years before
an Iraqi can turn a tap and drink healthy water in their homes.
There is serious work being done (some good, some bad) on revamping
Iraqi laws, but nobody can see that happening. I see virtually
nothing that would tell an average Iraqi that the US occupation is
working hard to make their lives better. There are good people
working hard, but it's all invisible for now. Who cares about
revamping securities oversight laws when you're scared to go out at
night.

Also, press relations are really bad. It's extremely difficult to
find information, get interviews, make it through the press phalanx
of true believers. It's almost impossible to get a usable quote
other than "everything's going great."

So...let me get this straight...nobody goes outside of the green
zone, the people in charge haven't a clue about what they're doing or
the people they're doing it to, the press has to fight a phalanx of
true believers to get any information from the occupation government
and if they step out of line (see the post of what's been
happening to Reuters employees below), they're likely to wind up
in a prison camp if not dead...and we're supposed to believe we're
getting an accurate picture of what's been going on over there.

The good will of Iraq's Shiite majority, so crucial to the success
of U.S. policy, may be eroding. Strong opposition by a top Shiite
cleric to key parts of a U.S. political blueprint for Iraq and the
spread of violent protests in Shiite areas suggest a dangerous
trend.

An Army Apache attack helicopter was shot down Tuesday, the third
downed in less than two weeks, though the crew escaped unharmed.
Witnesses said Tuesday that U.S. troops killed four civilians in
two incidents in which soldiers opened fire wildly after coming
under attack.

The international news agency Reuters has made a formal complaint
to the Pentagon following the "wrongful" arrest and apparent
"brutalisation" of three of its staff this month by US troops in
Iraq.

The complaint followed an incident in the town of Falluja when
American soldiers fired at two Iraqi cameramen and a driver from
the agency while they were filming the scene of a helicopter
crash.

The US military initially claimed that the Reuters journalists were
"enemy personnel" who had opened fire on US troops and refused to
release them for 72 hours.

Although Reuters has not commented publicly, it is understood that
the journalists were "brutalised and intimidated" by US soldiers,
who put bags over their heads, told them they would be sent to
Guantanamo Bay, and whispered: "Let's have sex."

...

The US military has so far refused to apologise and has bluntly
told Reuters to "drop" its complaint. Major General Charles
Swannack, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, claimed that
two US soldiers had provided sworn evidence that they had come
under fire. He admitted, however, that soldiers sometimes had to
make "snap judgments".

"More often than not they are right," he said.

On January 2 Reuters' Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja
stringer Ahmed Mohammed Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar
al-Badrani turned up at the crash site where a US Kiowa Warrior
helicopter had just been shot down, killing one soldier.

The journalists were all wearing bulletproof jackets clearly marked
"press". They drove off after US soldiers who were securing the
scene opened fire on their Mercedes, but were arrested shortly
afterwards.

The soldiers also detained a fourth Iraqi, working for the American
network NBC. No weapons were found, the US military
admitted.

Last night the nephew of veteran Reuters driver and latterly
cameraman Mr Ureibi said that US troops had forced his uncle to
strip naked and had ordered him to put his shoe in his
mouth.

"He protested that he was a journalist but they stuck a shoe in his
mouth anyway. They also hurt his leg. One of the soldiers told him:
'If you don't shut up we'll fuck you.'"

...

Last August a US soldier shot dead another Reuters cameraman, Mazen
Dana, after mistaking his camera for a rocket launcher while he
filmed outside a Baghdad prison.

An internal US investigation later cleared him of wrongdoing.
During the war last April another of the agency's cameramen,
Ukrainian Taras Protswuk, was killed after a US tank fired a shell
directly into his room in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, from
where he had been filming.

Sandra Fuhr, creator of the Boy Meets Boy comic strip, has
decided to pull the plug on it after a couple years run, so I've
delinked the site, since probably from now on it will just have the
same last strip of the series posted to it.

The good news is that all the old strips will continue to be
available on Keenspot. But I could have wished for more. There just
aren't that many good romantic stories about same sex couples. But
there is goodness at
PopImage.
Check out the entries in the Young Bottoms In Love series.
The artwork is first rate, and the stories are, mostly, very good.

So. We're going to the moon are we? Oh...and Mars too. And George
Bush is going to get us there.

Well, I could talk your ear off about that, but here's my problem: I
work for the Space Telescope Science Institute. We operate the Hubble
Space Telescope under contract for NASA. Now I can sit here and
write out the usual disclaimers, about how, you know, the opinions
expressed here do not represent the Institute, and so on. But these
days, somewhat more discretion is called for. If it were just a
matter of consequences falling on me that would be one thing. But I
care deeply about our mission, about the work we do in the name of
science and humanity. Even if we had an administration in power now,
that was a tad less preoccupied with payback (Valerie Plame), I'd
want to be careful about even remotely appearing to speak on the
politics of space, for anyone but myself here. So I have, generally
kept my mouth shut about that one topic, in case you haven't noticed.
Save for the occasional blurb about how much I love the work I do, I
don't say much about it.

That said, I'll say this: I think there is very little of more
importance to the future of the human race then the work we, as a
species, are doing now in space. From the pure science regarding the
origin and fundamental nature of the universe, to the slow, painful
process of learning how to live and work in space, this is where, I
strongly believe, humanity finally begins to take its destiny into
its own hands. I find it at least a little heartening to see that
many of those who remain opposed to manned space exploration, now
seem to feel that the unmanned science we do out there is very much
worthwhile. Hubble has been very much a part of that science...but
so too have the spacecraft we operate close to our good earth, that
study it, and the sun. We are still completely dependent on both for
our survival as a species, and probably will be for hundreds of years
to come. Because of the space born instruments we operate that
study the earth and the sun, we now have a far, far better
understanding of climate, and weather, and how the processes of
nature, and the activities of humans, affect them.

My prayer is that when it comes to our priorities in space, science
will always come first. Knowledge is power. It is also survival.

See how corporate consolidation of the media makes the Bush
propaganda machine awesomely powerful. Everywhere you turn, everyone
is always on message, because the message is all that you're ever
allowed to hear. The fact that Clear Channel is run by a bunch of
Texans with ties to the Smirking Fratboy doesn't mean they're in
collusion or anything...

Color's getting to be a habit around here. Just don't expect it all
the time. I like the old black and white style of editorial
cartooning. And it happens to fit my temperment. But from now on
all the Mark and Josh cartoons will be color.

I'm going to create a new page for the Terror Alert Level cartoons,
when I get a second one done (soon) and add the rest as I finish
them.

Well, actually, it's more like, I'm trying to keep things simple
here. A friend asked me the other day why I wasn't providing links
to the books, music and so on that I'm listing in the rightmost
column. And I've received queries about setting up comments here.
The answer is that I hand roll all my HTML pages for this web site,
in my programmer's editor. I enter the text you read here straight
into the HTML file as I compose it, not via a web tool. Same for the
images I've placed here and there. I fiddle with the image tags
and table layouts a bit, then open the file with a browser to see how
it looks, and if necessary, repeat the process until I have
everything looking the way I want.

It isn't difficult for someone who got his first computer back in the
days of WordStar, when all you had to work with was a character
based display, and you did your formatting by placing special
formatting instructions right in the text as you typed. Start bold
text here...stop it there...that kinda thing. Once I cracked open a
book on HTML, and discovered that it is remarkably similar to a bunch
of the old word processors I used to work with, I never had any
inclination to use a web authoring tool. And I write program code
for a living, and my head is just used to visualizing how code will
work as it is executed. HTML is a kind of very simplistic code;
instructions that tell a browser how to render a page. I can deal
with that. You go with what you know.

Those of us who write code, if we're any good, place a high value on
its elegance and symmetry. The more third party code I add to my
blog pages, the less elegant and symmetric it becomes, and the less
control I have over it. Also, I'd probably have to spend more time
in maintaining the code, as opposed to creating content. What is
more, some makers of third party blog goodies assume that you're
using a tool such as Blogger or Movable Type, to create your blog,
and they give you instructions for how to plug their goodie into one
of these tools, but not how they actually work down at the level of
the HTML itself. And I have very little time to spare in my day for
reverse engineering that stuff. So for now, I just don't use them.
When I see a way to add a feature here that maintains the look and
feel of my code, I probably will. But I don't want a lot of third
party code laying scattered all around my code.

As for the book, music and etcetera list: some of the stuff you will
see over there is as likely to come from second hand book stores,
which I browse often for treasures, as an Amazon or Borders. The
comics, which I added recently, might come from anywhere. An Amazon
blog account, or something like it, wouldn't give me the flexibility
I want. That list is just stuff that I'm tossing out as things I've
read or listened to or seen recently that I liked. It's part
recommendation, and part this is where Bruce's head is at these days.
I reckon most web surfers these days are smart enough to know how to
dig anything on my list up for themselves if they are interested.

Actually, I take the prospect of domestic terrorism
pretty seriously.
And I bet if Bush ever stopped thinking of ways to line his crony
pal's pockets with treasury money, he'd take it seriously too.

My mistake in thinking the Iraq war was all about oil was that I was
being too naive. I hadn't reckoned on the war profiteering. They'll
probably get richer on the war profiteering then on any of the oil
they manage to loot.

You have to read the transcript. It's a hoot. Zahn lies through her
teeth about what Howard Dean said. She get's the lie pointed out to
her, and she lies again. This goes on, back and forth, a few times,
and then Zahn just cuts Trippi off.

Here's what I think: since 9-11 the cable news networks have so
completely alienated everyone who isn't a right wing kook, that huge
segments of the voting population don't even watch their broadcasts
anymore. But instead of reading this as a warning that they're
loosing touch, they've taken it as a license to get more and more
brazen about it. They hardly even try to hide the fact that they
loath democrats and democratic voters anymore.

But now the blogs are stepping in, and even though people don't
bother with the cable news broadcasts anymore, their brazen lies are
reaching the other half of the voting population, and they are
becoming more and more outraged by it, and letting the news networks
know about it. Now the same news organizations that routinely
broadcast bullshit to the voters are all bellyaching about democratic
anger. Well, if you spit in someone's face and laugh often enough,
yeah, they're going to get angry.

If you thought the secret courts were just a thing of Guantanamo Bay,
think again.

"In recent months, it has become evident that the U.S. District Court
for the Southern District of Florida maintains a dual, separate
docket of public and non-public cases," Dalglish wrote in a brief
filed late last month in the 11th Circuit appeal of convicted
Colombian drug lord Fabio Ochoa Vasquez.

In its Supreme Court brief, the media group called the secret jailing
of an Algerian-born waiter "perhaps the most egregious recent example
of an alarming trend toward excessive secrecy in the federal courts,
particularly in cases that bear even a tangential connection to the
events of Sept. 11."

Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel, 34, of Deerfield Beach, was arrested for a
violating his student visa a month after the terror attacks. Although
he sought his release in the District Court and appealed to the 11th
Circuit, no public record of his case existed until his appeal to the
U.S. Supreme Court. The media group last week asked to join the case
as a party, a request the high court rarely grants.

In Ochoa's 11th Circuit appeal, the media group is challenging a
secret plea bargain and sentencing involving Nicolas Bergonzoli, a
Colombian drug smuggler who had business dealings with Ochoa. The
case suggests the secret docketing system predates the Sept. 11
attacks.

...

Neither case appeared on the court's public docket, where it would
have been assigned a number and scanned into a computer file. As a
result, the public had no way of knowing they existed. Hearings were
conducted behind closed doors, and all documents and legal motions
were filed under seal. The sensitive court papers were kept
separately in a vault at the court clerk's office in Miami, according
to attorneys familiar with the practice.

...

Ochoa's lawyers, G. Richard Strafer and Roy Black, had heard rumors
about Bergonzoli, ran a name search and discovered a federal case
filed in Connecticut. The file included a letter to the court clerk,
transferring the case, and a new Miami docket number. But when
Strafer plugged the number into the court's computer system, he found
nothing. The court clerk told him no such case existed, he said.

He found Bergonzoli in a federal prison, serving 37 months.

Strafer and Black have long argued that government secrecy hampered
Ochoa's defense.

...that's our task. To give a damn. About each other. About the
welfare of our kind. To care whether or not we survive. You hear
the question occasionally, regarding intelligent life on other
planets: if it exists, why haven't we already been visited?
Here's one possible reason.

Maybe the problem isn't that life in the universe is rare. Maybe the
problem is surviving to the point where it can achieve space flight,
and migrate to other worlds as necessary. Any one of the
catastrophes mentioned in
the sidebar article,
as possible reasons for the five great mass extinctions here on
earth, would probably, if they occurred right now, wipe us clean out.
I reckon we'll need several hundred years more to get ourselves fully
established as a species on other worlds of our solar system, never
mind the nearby stars. And that assumes a serious commitment to
actually do it.

Which, from some of the disparaging comments around the web I've been
reading regarding the current Mars probes, and NASA, we may not
really have. Maybe it's just the usual human short sightedness.
Life on earth is good now, so of course it always will be.
Sure, history has recorded horrific natural disasters...floods,
famine, pestilence...but it wasn't like the earth was ever in any
danger of being destroyed or anything. We have survived badness
before. But the entire span of human existence on this earth is
way shorter then the time between mass extinctions. Whatever
caused the Permian-Triassic extinction, about 250 million years ago,
killed 90 percent of all life on earth. The oldest known
modern human fossils, recently found in Ethiopia, are only about
160 thousand years old.

So I suppose on the one hand you can argue that it probably isn't
going to happen again any time soon. On the other, it
happens! Humanity has made it this far. The more I learn
about the raging violence that goes on in the cosmos, the more I have
to wonder how many intelligent species had the chance we do now. So
what if your primary sun is one of the average stable ones like ours
is, that live for ten billion years or so, and then slowly and
gracefully die? If that super giant twenty light years away decides
it's time for the big light show, or some other super massive star
lots further away, but with poles that just happen to be facing you
pops, well, too bad. Back to square one we go. Or maybe it's some
piece of space rock that just happens to careen into your planet's
path. There are so many ways for a planet with life taking hold on
it to have a really bad day. Earth has had at least five of them
before we came along. Six, if you count the one that resulted in our
now having a moon. If there was any form of rudimentary life taking
hold on that ancient earth, we have no way of even knowing it now.

But now we've made it to point where we can take the leap into space.
We can act now to preserve our kind, if we have the collective
foresight and will to do so. Or not. Maybe the ultimate disaster
happens again tomorrow. Maybe it doesn't happen for another hundred
thousand years or so. Maybe it happens in another hundred years or
so, with our great-great-great grandchildren staring at its approach
in wonder, that nothing was done to make survival a possibility, when
it could have mattered. We're not playing dice with the future of
humanity here. We're just not caring enough.

I guess you have to believe that the human race is worth preserving.
I believe it, but also have to admit that I know quite a few people
who don't. I just don't understand that. How does someone get up in
the morning, and go about their day, bearing with them the belief
that the species they are is unfit to survive and endure? How do
you go about your day not caring whether it does or does not? Isn't
the act of earning a living every day, doing whatever it is that you
do, in what ever trade or art you practice, isn't taking care of your
family, your loved ones, an affirmation that life is not only worth
living, but worth preserving?

The comments sections of a lot of blogs are almost as much fun to
read as the blogs hosting them. Case in point being this grin worthy
exchange on Matthew Yglesias' blog. First, Matthew posts the
following:

If anyone knows what was responsible for the mass of white people
invading the Columbia Heights/Mount Pleasant area this afternoon,
do let me know. Many of the people in question seemed to be trying
to walk while reading some sort of piece of paper, but efforts to
steal a glance and figure out what they were doing proved futile.

To which a perfectly adorable wag named seedub in the comments
section replied:

Is this why you're an opinion journalist? Because you're afraid to
ask a stranger what they're doing?

That's the risk you run hosting a comments board I suppose. But not
everyone who watches silently, is afraid to ask. Some of us just
like to speculate on our own. Asking, is like peeking at the answers
in the back of the book.

Some possibilities that crossed my mind:

The directions to Mr. P's that were passed around at this week's
Exodus support group meeting, were written on the back of Mount
Pleasant farmer's market flyers.

An evil neuroscientist living in Georgetown has written a short
poem that causes people reading it to walk to Mount Pleasant
without their being aware that their feet are moving.

A printing accident resulted in directions to Mount Pleasant
being printed on Chevy Chase Weight Watchers' recipe cards for
that day.

In an effort to reduce bulging conservative lobbyist waistlines,
the K street offices of the Jefferson Davis Foundation have
scattered pages from Hannity's Let Freedom Ring all over Washington
DC. Each page has directions to where to find the next page printed
at the bottom.

A friend of mine (who really should start a blog of his own), sent me
a link to a
Capital Gang transcript.
This part is kinda cute:

O'BEIRNE: Mark, I think Maine has joined blue state America, Al
Gore's America, to crack down, use the power of the government to
crack down on personal behavior that liberals disapprove of.
Although, having said that, I do think it is beginning in blue
state America, but it's going to spread. I mean, it began with
movie theaters and planes. Now, you can see how in the case of
both, you couldn't sort of leave it up to the market to determine
whether or not people wanted to smoke or not smoke.

But that's not true of bars and restaurants. So it strikes me that
the impulse is more totalitarian, than wanting to protect either
customers or staff, because, presumably, the majority of bars and
restaurants would outlaw smoking, and people who wanted that
atmosphere would go there, but a bar or a restaurant owner would
have the option of allowing smoking and let the market dictate how
well he does. But they won't permit that. It has to be a total ban,
because, as I said, it's a totalitarian impulse.

SHIELDS: It's OK to use the power of the federal government or
government to ban behavior that conservatives don't like?

O'BEIRNE: Like what?

SHIELDS: Well, gay marriage.

O'BEIRNE: The federal government is not banning gay marriage.
States don't recognize gay marriage.

SHIELDS: The constitutional amendment was one of the things
being...

O'BEIRNE: A constitutional amendment will prohibit a judge from
imposing gay marriage, which is the only way it's happened any
place...

My friend points out the usual republican hypocrisy here in opposing
big brother government on one issue, while willingly employing it
elsewhere. But there is another. Consider how O'Beirne lies through
his teeth about the nature of the anti same sex marriage amendment
now being proposed. No, it will not simply prevent the courts from
"imposing" same sex marriage. It prohibits the courts from giving
same sex couples any legal rights whatsoever. Everything from
hospital visitation rights to the right to mutual heath care
benefits and joint property, to the right to make funeral
arrangements. And if a state government passes laws that give
same sex couples these rights, anti gay political action
groups, businesses and individuals can challenge them in court as
violations of the constitution (as they are doing now in California).
There is no way O'Beirne doesn't know this.

Calling republicans hypocrites ennobles them. They're thugs. And it
isn't just the liberties of gay and lesbian Americans that
they're trying to erase.

...Matthew Yglesias, who I recently added to my blog roll, comes up
with crap like this:

Brian Leiter quotes from a new anti-Bush song by Willie Nelson
including, inter alia, the question "How much oil is one human life
worth?" We all understand the point of including the line, though I
think this is a misguided critique as it is, in fact, highly unlikely
that the Iraq venture will net the US much of anything in the way of
oil-related benefits (US-based oil companies on the other hand might
benefit, but that's a different issue).

Nevertheless, I think this is actually a legitimate (i.e.,
non-rhetorical) question. If the price of crude oil were to suddenly
double Monday morning the result would be widespread human suffering
as waves of economic destruction wending their way through the
developed world. "Blood for oil" makes a mighty bad slogan compared
to, say, "blood for freedom" or something, but expending a few lives
to prevent global economic collapse seems like a legitimate thing to
do. So I don't know how much oil a human life is worth, but I'm
confident that a human life is, in fact, worth some finite quantity
of oil.

Does he think this has never happened? Okay...he looks a little
youngish in that picture of himself on his web site, so maybe he
didn't live through the oil embargo in the 1970s, and the first of
the big spikes in the price of crude. I, on the other hand, sat
through the gas lines. Did your license plate end on an even or odd
number? How far could Your car go on ten gallons of gas?
Oh...look...it isn't just things made of oil by-products, but
everything delivered by truck to the stores is more expensive. Yes
it was a bad time all around. But would throwing the world into
complete chaos by invading the oil producing nations, as some of the
right wing kooks back then were advocating, have made matters better?
If a human life is worth so many barrels of oil, how many lives does
a global oil war cost? Let's look at it another way: how many
human lives is peace worth?

What happened back in the 70s was the economies of the developed
world adapted to the new reality. Oil wasn't cheap anymore. Cars
became more fuel efficient. New standards for weatherproofing
buildings came on line. Here in North America, we looked to better
ways to utilize our huge coal reserves. An economy that didn't care
how much it wasted the oil products it used started rethinking
efficiency. We got better at using the oil we used. We had
to.

At least for a while. Eventually the price of oil came back down
again because we reduced our need of it, and surprise, surprise, when
the price came back down we fell back into our old ways, and started
using more. Now we're back into the cheap oil economy again, but if
the price doubled we would once again rethink all the ways we use
oil. Here's the real worry: that CEOs who make their money in the
cheap oil economy, whether it's off of oil directly or one of its
many by-products, would have to worry about what happens when
alternative businesses become competitive, and start taking their
customers away. No doubt they'd rather keep the status quo.
Oh...and everyone who bought a Hummer for the shear macho thrill of
it and damn the future consequences would get a chance to play that
other Big Boy's game called Grow Up.

Keep this in mind: it isn't that We're dependent on cheap oil, but
that the guys in the white house right now are dependent, on our
continued dependency on oil. Sure, if the price goes up then so do
their profits, but if it goes up enough then oil and oil by-product
consumers start looking for alternatives. Then, as far as the old
guard is concerned, the worst could happen: new opportunities and new
people start appearing on the scene and pull the business rug out
from under them.

The Bush white house is at its core a big business protectionist
white house. They have elevated big business cronyism to the status
of federal policy. They have waged war, costing many American lives,
to secure their friends' profits. That is not a misguided critique,
it is letting the facts of this war speak for themselves. Willie
Nelson asks a good question, but it is not the only one. How many
barrels of oil is American Democracy worth would be another.

One other thing:

Once again I'm driven to wonder why the government is exploring outer
space.

We all live in space. All of us. Yes, we live on earth, but earth
takes its yearly orbits around a pretty average star, in a not
too terribly unique part of the universe that we damn well better
get to know as well as we are capable of knowing it, for the sake
of securing our long term future in it.

This kind of research won't generate profits for any CEOs bottom
line, yet it's as necessary as any inquiry into earthquakes or
climate or disease. That's why government does it. If you think
it's an unnecessary waste of taxpayer money, take a look at those
little blackish splotches on the face of Jupiter. Some of them
are the size of the planet whose air you're now breathing.

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